Multi-Modal Modeling of Open Source Software Requirements Processes

Understanding the context, structure, activities, and content of software development processes found in practice has been and remains a challenging problem. In the world of free/open source software development, discovering and understanding what processes are used in particular projects is important in determining how they are similar to or different from those advocated by the software engineering community. Prior studies however have revealed that the requirements processes in OSSD projects are different in a number of ways, including the general lack of explicit software requirements specifications. In this paper, we describe how a variety of modeling perspectives and techniques are used to elicit, analyze, and validate software requirements processes found in OSSD projects, with examples drawn from studies of the NetBeans.org project.