Understanding the Requirements for Open Source Software

Abstract

This study presents findings from an empirical study directed at understanding the roles, forms, and consequences arising in requirements for open source software (OSS) development efforts. Five open source software development communities are described, examined, and compared to help discover what differences may be observed. At least two dozen kinds of software informalisms are found to play a critical role in the elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and management of requirements for developing OSS systems. Subsequently understanding the roles these software informalisms take in a new formulation of the requirements development process for OSS 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 when developing OSS systems. Other findings identify how OSS requirements are decentralized across multiple informalisms, and to the need for advances in how to specify the capabilities of existing OSS systems.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 17, 2009
Accession Number
ADA530027

Entities

People

  • Thomas Alspaugh
  • Walt Scaccho

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Business Administration
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Electronic Mail
  • Engineering
  • Information Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Internet
  • Multiagent Systems
  • Network Science
  • Open Source Software
  • Organizational Structure
  • Social Media
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Web Browsers

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Software Engineering.
  • Systems Analysis and Design