Understanding the Requirements for Developing Open Source Software Systems
Walt Scacchi
Institute for Software Research
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697-3425 USA
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi
wscacchi@ics.uci.edu
Abstract
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.