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 theserequirements or with very specific requirements-related aspects of open-source development. In this study we bridge betweenthese two approaches by exploring the existing relationships between open-source requirements and few characteristics ofopen-source projects (software quality and software project success). First we develop a requirements-based taxonomy ofopen-source projects and we discover patterns linking between this taxonomy and project success. We also propose aclassification of requirement types based on their representativeness in open-source projects. This highlights the overallimportance of various types of requirements in the context of open-source software development. We also identify exceptionsdefined as the unusually high frequency of a requirement type and explain them based on the specific domain addressedwithin the project containing the exception. Finally, we investigate the lifecycle of 16 open-source projects and discover andexplain patterns of evolution for a number of requirement types