Supporting Consensus-based Sofware Development: a Vision Paper

Traditional, vertical organizational models of software development have been challenged by more agile and collaborative structures. Recently, this has also been demonstrated in the emergence of explicitly horizontalist organizational structures, focused on consensus-based decision making. In this paper, we describe the principles and processes of these “ConsensusBased Communities” (CBCs) and outline the main challenges they face as they try to implement “Consensus-Based Software Development” (CBSD). We express these as early, high level requirements for a tool supported methodology. Based on these, we present and analysis of existing tools that shows that no single tool provides complete support for consensus-based group decision making. We thus outline directions for future research, identifying opportunities for the development and deployement of model-based techniques in this emergent field.