UNDERSTANDING THE REQUIREMENTS FOR DEVELOPING OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

Institute for Software Research
University of California, Irvine
This study presents an initial set of findings from an empirical study of
socio-technical processes, system configurations, organizational
contexts,
and interrelationships that give rise to open source software. In this
presentation, the focus is directed at understanding the requirements for
open software development efforts, and how the development of these
requirements differs from those traditional to software engineering and
requirements engineering. Four open software development communities are
described, examined, and compared to help discover what these differences
may be. Eight kinds of "software informalisms" are found to play a
critical
role in the elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and
management of requirements for developing open software systems.
Subsequently, understanding the roles these software informalisms take in
a
new formulation of the requirements development process for open source
software is the focus of this study. This focus enables considering a
reformulation of the requirements engineering process and its associated
artifacts or (in)formalisms to better account for the requirements for
developing open source software systems.

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