Large software projects have many stakeholders. In order for the resulting software system and architecture to be aligned with the enterprise and stakeholder needs, key stakeholders must be adequately consulted and involved in the project. This work proposes the use of genetic algorithms to identify key stakeholders and their actual influence in requirements elicitation, given the stakeholders’ requirements and the actual set of requirements implemented in the project. The proposed method is applied to a large real-world software project. Results show that search is able to identify key stakeholders accurately. Results also indicate that many different good solutions exist. This implies that a stakeholder has the potential to play a key role in requirements elicitation, depending on which other stakeholders are already involved. This work demonstrates the true complexity of requirements elicitation – all stakeholders should be consulted, but not all of them should be treated as key stakeholders, even if they appear to be significant based on their role in the domain.
