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PROPAGATION OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE IN OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT: CAUSES AND EFFECTS – A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE

Iyer, Deepa Gopal

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Management.
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. To understand the reciprocal relationship between the varying attributes of requirements that are addressed by different social network configurations for `computing’ requirements, the following questions need to be addressed: 1. How can the social network configuration of OSS projects be explained by the attributes of requirements it faces that emanates from the environment? 2. Are the qualities of internal requirements produced by the OSS projects explained by its particular social network configuration and if so, how? The requirement attributes are measured using a 6-V requirements model centered on the volume, veracity, volatility, velocity, vagueness and variance of software requirements while the social network configurations of RE knowledge flow is measured using social network analysis of the requirement activities in OSS projects. It is hypothesized that the effect of communication centrality in OSS projects on its effective task completion rates changes under various conditions of the projects external environment measured in terms of the volume of requirements faced, velocity of change in requirements and variance in requirements scope. Changes in communication centrality is also hypothesized to be associated with changes in the veracity and vagueness of software requirements produced by during the OSS development endeavor. The hypotheses of the study are tested using an empirical analysis of selected sample of GitHub OSS projects followed by a longitudinal qualitative case study of a selected OSS project.
Kalle Lyytinen (Committee Chair)

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Citations

  • Iyer, D. G. (2018). PROPAGATION OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE IN OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT: CAUSES AND EFFECTS – A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1529686228185568

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Iyer, Deepa. PROPAGATION OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE IN OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT: CAUSES AND EFFECTS – A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE. 2018. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1529686228185568.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Iyer, Deepa. "PROPAGATION OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE IN OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT: CAUSES AND EFFECTS – A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1529686228185568

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)