Towards Multi-Party Evolution of Social Software

Many modern communication and information systems are increasingly embedded into society. These systems stretch across many organizations, have very large, heterogeneous user groups, and support complex processes. Accordingly, requirements engineering methods include techniques for detailed stakeholder modeling that go far beyond the classical role separation into customer, developer, and user [AR04]. Furthermore, the system requirements often depend on rules decided by stakeholders not involved in the software development and maintenance. In particular, changes in legal regulations or laws directly call for modifications of administrative software. Even for today’s software systems, the complexity of the relationship between social and administrative processes on the one side and software development and maintenance processes on the other side is often underestimated and leads to severe engineering problems. For example, the project “HochschulStart” that is aiming to build a system for application and enrollment of students at German universities has suffered from the large number of involved universities and ministries (see [Mer12]). It also illustrates the close relationship between regulations, social processes and software as well as the resulting development challenges.