Attributes of Open Source Software Requirements -- The Effect of the External Environment and Internal Social Structure
Deepa Gopal, Aron Lindberg, Kalle Lyytinen · 2016
Popularity of open source software (OSS) projects has spiked an interest in the requirements engineering (RE) practices of such communities that are starkly different from those in traditional software development projects. Past work has focused on characterizing the main differences between OSS and traditional forms of software RE. In this effort we focus on differences in RE activity in OSS. RE is characterized as a socio-technical distributed cognitive (DCog) activity where multiple actors deploy artifacts to 'compute' requirements. To uncover how OSS projects configure the socio-technical distribution of cognitive processes to respond to varying attributes of incoming requirements we conduct a comparative analysis of four successful OSS projects. We observe that the volume of requirements faced by an OSS group dictates largely the nature of its social formation while the volatility experienced in the requirements dictates the overlap the project exhibits with the larger external community. Finally the velocity of change in technological requirements influence the project's documentation practices of requirements with the level of design consistency desired in the end product influencing the decision-making channels used in the development endeavor.