Effects of Social Structures in Requirements Quality of Open Source Software Project Development

There is a growing interest in the requirements engineering (RE) practices of open source software (OSS) projects that are starkly different from those in traditional software development contexts. OSS projects are viewed as self-organizing collaborative social networks wherein OSS RE is a socio-technical distributed cognitive activity. With OSS projects exhibiting diverse social structures, the effects of such variations on the RE quality is unknown. The current study aims to fill this gap via a qualitative comparative study of three OSS projects – RubyonRails, Django and Bootstrap. The initial analysis expose that OSS projects with a lower communication centrality produce more veracious and less vague requirements while projects with a higher ratio of core to periphery members are associated with lesser variance in requirements. A quantitative analysis of OSS projects housed in SourceForge repository is suggested as a future extension to test the resulting hypotheses proposed through this qualitative study