TY - GEN
T1 - 'Computing' requirements in open source software projects
AU - Xiao, Xuan
AU - Lindberg, Aron
AU - Hansen, Sean
AU - Lyytinen, Kalle
AU - Wang, Tienan
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Distributed cognition
KW - Open source software
KW - Requirements computation
KW - Requirements engineering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84897691197&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84897691197&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84897691197
SN - 9781629934266
T3 - International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2013): Reshaping Society Through Information Systems Design
SP - 1
EP - 17
BT - International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2013)
T2 - International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2013
Y2 - 15 December 2013 through 18 December 2013
ER -