Clustering Stakeholders for Requirements Decision Making

[Context and motivation] Novel web-based requirements elicitation tools offer the possibility to collect requirements preferences from large number of stakeholders. Such tools have the potential to provide useful data for requirements prioritization and selection. [Question/problem] However, existing requirements prioritization and selection techniques do not work in this context because they assume requirements ratings from a small number of stakeholders groups, rather than from a large number of individuals. They also assume that the relevant groups of stakeholders have been identified a priori, and that all stakeholders within a group have the same preferences. [Principal ideas/ results] This paper aims at addressing these problems by applying cluster analysis techniques used in the area of market segmentation for identifying relevant groups of stakeholders to be used for requirements decision making. [Contribution] We describe a clustering analysis technique that can be used in this context and evaluate its adequacy on a pilot case study.