A method for analyzing the context of stakeholders and their requirements

Requirements of software are sometimes added and changed throughout the development phases. In this paper, we introduce a method to analyze environmental factors that sometimes cause changes in requirements. The scope of the i* framework, for example, does not focus on environmental factors, but on the intentional actors and their dependencies. To date, the various environmental factors are not analyzed well. Furthermore, some of the environmental factors have relationships with stakeholders and thus change the intentions of stakeholders through these social relations. We consider these relationships as one of the providers of and a mechanism that forces changes in requirements. Before we proceed to prove the role of this mechanism through an application to a real project, we first define four social relations that connect an environmental factor and a stakeholder, and introduce an analysis method of the context. The effectiveness of the method is shown through several examples and discussed from the view of the possibility of the prediction of requirements changes.