Operationalization of Equity Through a Quantitative Analysis of Stakeholder Salience

The incorporation of human values into software engineering processes is increasingly recognised as crucial, yet there is still a lack of practical methods to ensure their inclusion. A key challenge in this area is to identify a representative set of stakeholders while maintaining equality and diversity throughout the development process. This study aims to leverage stakeholder salience—defined by the attributes of power, legitimacy, and urgency—to partition stakeholders using a quantile-based statistical approach, establishing stakeholder groups that prevent discrimination and marginalization in requirements engineering processes. We propose a quantile-based statistical method for systematic stakeholder partitioning to ensure that diverse interests are considered and formalize equality and diversity through quantitative metrics in order to operationalize fairness. We applied the proposed method to the RALIC dataset to evaluate its applicability, considering two and three levels of granularity (binary medians and ternary terciles) for each salience component to assess its effectiveness in maintaining equality and diversity. Integrating quantile-based stakeholder salience partitioning into the identification process provides a structured approach to incorporating human values into software engineering, demonstrating that tercile partitioning significantly optimizes group balance and spatial coverage, ultimately contributing to more inclusive and equitable decision-making in requirements gathering.