Title: Propagation of Requirements Engineering Knowledge in Open Source Development: Causes and Effects – A Social Network Perspective
Abstract: Popularity of open source software (OSS) development projects has spiked an interest in requirements engineering (RE) practices of such communities that are starkly different from those of traditional software development projects. Past work has focused on characterizing this difference while this work centers on the variations in the propagation of RE knowledge among different OSS project development endeavors. The OSS RE activity in OSS projects is conceptualized as a socio-technical distributed cognitive activity where heterogeneous actors interact with one another and structural artifacts to `compute’ requirements. These coordinated sequences of action are continuously interrupted and shaped by the demands of an ever-changing environment resulting in various social networks visible in the communicative pathways deployed in the projects. We explore how the social network configurations in OSS projects manifesting the flow of RE knowledge respond to the attributes of the environment housing the projects and their effects on the attributes of software requirements produced by such project development endeavors.
Full-Paper: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:case1529686228185568
