How Do Open Source Software (OSS) Developers Practice and Perceive Requirements Engineering? An Empirical Study

In open source software (OSS) development domain (a largely volunteer driven, geographically distributed, web based form of software development), it is mainly the OSS developers who are responsible for overseeing and managing the developmental activities. Existing OSS literature, based on qualitative analysis of web-based artifacts (e.g. data on discussion forums, issue databases) of a few OSS projects, report that requirements generation in OSS development is largely informal and ad hoc. But there is lack of an empirical study involving the practitioners themselves i.e. the OSS developers. We conducted a web-based survey among OSS developers in order to gain insights in to how they actually practice requirements engineering activities and what are their perceptions about it. For 57 requirements engineering practices obtained from closed source software development (CSSD) literature, the respondents indicated whether they currently used those practices in their OSS projects and whether those practices were useful for OSS development. The analysis of survey responses revealed that OSS developers used requirements engineering practices (from CSSD) significantly less in their developmental activities than what they believed they should have, indicated through usefulness ratings. We also asked participating OSS developers to indicate their perceptions about the usage of five informal requirements generation activities reported in OSS literature (e.g. developers simply asserting the requirements instead of eliciting). Subsequent analysis revealed that OSS developers used informal requirements generation activities significantly more than requirements elicitation practices (from CSSD) in their developmental activities. We use the survey findings to discuss implications for practice and research.