When you don’t know with whom to collaborate: Towards an interactive system connecting contributors in a research project

Abstract

Stakeholders are important for software projects as they help to define the requirements. However, in case of multiple stakeholders with different viewpoints, it is often difficult to find a suitable solution for almost everybody. We faced this situation in a large interdisciplinary research project with contributors from different natural sciences. The contributors have to collaborate with each other, i.e., they need to share and exchange knowledge, data, and research strategies from their disciplines. In order to support them, we develop an approach that facilitates the collaboration by enabling data exchange between research groups. However, the contributors – i.e., stakeholders – do not know with whom and how to collaborate. Therefore, it is difficult to identify stakeholders who can contribute to the requirements elicitation at the moment. In this paper, we present the first idea of our approach, as well as faced and expected challenges and open questions.