So who is impacted anyway - a preliminary study of indirect stakeholder identification in practice

Due to the proliferation of disruptive technologies such as AI into almost every aspect of modern society, software systems increasingly affect the lives of people who do not directly use these systems -with potentially serious and harmful consequences. However, current software development practices do not yet account for this trend sufficiently well and frequently overlook indirect stakeholders. This paper presents the results of a preliminary interview-based study of software professionals aimed at understanding the state-of-practice of indirect stakeholder identification in the software industry. Our initial findings confirm that indirect stakeholders are often overlooked due to customer expectations, project constraints, the prevailing technology-centric software engineering culture and a lack of practical methods and tools. Based on these findings, we outline a roadmap for the investigation of methods and tools for the effective and efficient identification of indirect stakeholders.