Date of Award
Spring 5-18-2022
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Software Engineering
Department
Software Engineering and Game Design and Development
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Nasrin Dehbozorgi
Second Advisor
Paola Spoletini
Third Advisor
Yan Huang
Abstract
The stakeholder’s tacit knowledge is a key crown jewel of requirements elicitation, and in turn software development at large. This critical element holds significant leverage in determining the outcome and the quality of the requirements, and therefore the development endeavor holistically. Due to its very nature of being tacit, it is innately covert and deeply hidden within the stakeholders’ minds, so it is extremely difficult to articulate and relay, as well as even harder to elicit and utilize. Additionally, the literature reports that there is a scarcity of available theorizations and solutions for addressing this challenge, posing a key and recurrent challenge in its successful attainment, functional utilization, theoretical understanding and synthesis, as well as successful harvesting. The thesis presents a theoretical knowledge management framework for tacit knowledge acquisition, the Stakeholder-Profile, in the spirit of contributing to the body of knowledge. The framework offers a theoretical vision of tacit knowledge acquisition of the stakeholders as individuals, and a conceptual vision of its application in the context of a specifically designed requirements elicitation interview process model. In view of this context, the framework offers a holistic conceptual solution vision, including an analysis of the mitigating factors for tacit knowledge acquisition in view of an interview, the theoretical makeup, synthesis, and acquisition of the stakeholder’s tacit knowledge as individuals, an integration of the vision into an interview-specific process model, and an interview process outcome conceptual assessing quality metric.