'Computing' requirements in open source software projects

Xuan Xiao, Aron Lindberg, Sean Hansen, Kalle Lyytinen, Tienan Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Due to high dissimilarity with traditional software development, Requirements Engineering (RE) in Open Source Software (OSS) remains poorly understood, despite the visible success of many OSS projects. In this study, we approach OSS RE as a sociotechnical and distributed cognitive activity where multiple actors deploy heterogeneous artifacts to 'compute' requirements as to reach a collectively-held understanding of what the software is going to do. We conduct a case study of a popular OSS project, Rubinius (a Ruby programming language runtime environment). Specifically, we investigate the ways in which this project exhibits distribution of cognitive efforts along social, structural, and temporal dimensions and how its requirements computation takes place accordingly. In particular, we seek to generalize to a theoretical framework that explains how three temporally-ordered processes of distributed cognition in OSS projects, denoted excavation, instantiation, and testing-inthe- wild, tie together to form a powerful distributed computational structure to manage requirements.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2013)
Subtitle of host publicationReshaping Society Through Information Systems Design
Pages1-17
Number of pages17
StatePublished - 2013
EventInternational Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2013 - Milan, Italy
Duration: 15 Dec 201318 Dec 2013

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2013): Reshaping Society Through Information Systems Design
Volume1

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2013
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityMilan
Period15/12/1318/12/13

Keywords

  • Distributed cognition
  • Open source software
  • Requirements computation
  • Requirements engineering

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