Stakeholder

A stakeholder is any individual, team, or organization with an interest in a system, its development, or its operation. Per ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010, that interest need not be favorable. It can be positive, as when a stakeholder wants to benefit from the system; neutral, as when a stakeholder is only required to test or verify it; or negative, as when a stakeholder competes with the system or wants it to fail.

Stakeholders extend well beyond a system’s end users. The category also covers employees, owners, and administrators who depend on the system operationally; the requirements engineers and business analysts who elicit and shape what it should do; the developers, designers, and architects who build it; project and product managers and product owners who steer its direction; and external parties such as government agencies with a regulatory interest.

Because stakeholders' interests routinely conflict — a regulator’s concerns are rarely a developer’s, and a competitor’s never align with either — identifying the relevant stakeholders for a system and reconciling what each of them needs from it is treated as a distinct, early activity in requirements engineering and architecture description work, rather than something to discover incidentally along the way.