A Requirements-Based Analysis of Success in Open-Source Software Development Projects

The literature on open-source requirements is commonly concerned either with the processes associated with these requirements or with very specific requirements-related aspects of open-source development. In this study we bridge between these two approaches by exploring the existing relationships between open-source requirements and few characteristics of open-source projects (software quality and software project success). First we develop a requirements-based taxonomy of open-source projects and we discover patterns linking between this taxonomy and project success. We also propose a classification of requirement types based on their representativeness in open-source projects. This highlights the overall importance of various types of requirements in the context of open-source software development. We also identify exceptions defined as the unusually high frequency of a requirement type and explain them based on the specific domain addressed within the project containing the exception. Finally, we investigate the lifecycle of 16 open-source projects and discover and explain patterns of evolution for a number of requirement types.