TY - GEN
T1 - Attributes of open source software requirements - The effect of the external environment and internal social structure
AU - Gopal, Deepa
AU - Lindberg, Aron
AU - Lyytinen, Kalle
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2016/3/7
Y1 - 2016/3/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Comparative case study
KW - Distributed cognition
KW - External environment
KW - Open source software
KW - Qualitative
KW - Requirement attributes
KW - Social distribution
KW - Structural distribution
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84975454598&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/HICSS.2016.618
DO - 10.1109/HICSS.2016.618
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84975454598
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
SP - 4982
EP - 4991
BT - Proceedings of the 49th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2016
A2 - Sprague, Ralph H.
A2 - Bui, Tung X.
T2 - 49th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2016
Y2 - 5 January 2016 through 8 January 2016
ER -