Understanding Requirements for Developing Open Source Software Systems

This study presents an initial set of findings from an empirical study of social processes, technical system configurations, organizational contexts, and interrelationships that give rise to open software. 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. Informal software descriptions and the online social discourse that surrounds these narrative descriptions are found to play a critical role in the elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and management of requirements for developing open software systems. DRAFT – Circulated for comment only, July 2001. 2 Understanding Requirements for Developing Open Source