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142 S o f t w a r e & S y s t e m s R e q u i r e m e n t s E n g i n e e r i n g : I n P r a c t i c e

Begin to document each stakeholder class as you identify it. For
each potentially important stakeholder class, you may want to describe

• Major concerns of that class of stakeholders
• Their stake in the project (how the project benefits or hurts
them, including how big the impact is)
• Expertise and other inputs they bring to the project
• How much of their time you expect to need
• When you expect them to spend significant time talking to
you about the project, considering both when you need them
and when they will begin to see the project as urgent enough
to spend time on
• Candidates to represent the class of stakeholders
Prioritize the stakeholder classes as you go along, both in terms of
importance and urgency. You don’t need to complete the analysis if
you are sure a stakeholder class is unimportant, but it helps to at least
mention the class and why it is not important, so that others know
you have thought about it.
Next, choose the stakeholder representatives. For each stakeholder
class, consider how the candidate fits or differs from the rest of the
class members. Pay particular attention to

• The political importance of the individual within the
organization
• Availability
• Importance of the project to the individual personally
• Potential for conflicting agendas
Conflicting agendas are an inevitable part of the analysis. For
example, if your project is building a software platform or library that
will be used in several different products, each product will have a
different development schedule and will use your software in a different
way. When you find that candidates to represent the same class have
conflicting agendas, you may want to do one of the following:

• Give preference to the candidate for whom the project is most
important and/or urgent.
• Split the stakeholder class into two or more classes.

5.5 Methods for Architectural Requirements Engineering

In this section, we describe a number of methods that architects use
for defining and analyzing quality attribute requirements as part of
starting system design.