On scoping stakeholders and artifacts in software process

Stakeholder and artifact are regarded as two important elements in software engineering processes, but they are rarely systematically investigated in software process modeling and simulation. Inspired by the Workshop of Modeling Systems and Software Engineering Processes in 2008 at University of Southern California and our previous studies on integrating stakeholders’ perspectives into software process modeling, we undertook a study on the application of these entities in software engineering, through both a systematic review and a complementary web survey within software process research and practice communities. Our results reveal that the portion of studies on process stakeholders and process artifacts in software engineering is unexpectedly small, and there lacks consistent understanding of process stakeholder roles. By further analysis of stakeholder roles and artifact types based on our results, we define the stakeholder and artifact in the lieu of software process engineering, and differentiate stakeholder and artifact in different application scopes.