Continuous clarification and emergent requirements flows in open-commercial software ecosystems

Abstract

Software engineering practice has shifted from the development of products in closed environments toward more open and collaborative efforts. Software development has become significantly interdependent with other systems (e.g. services, apps) and typically takes place within large ecosystems of networked communities of stakeholder organizations. Such software ecosystems promise increased innovation power and support for consumer-oriented software services at scale and are characterized by a certain openness of their information flows. While such openness supports project and reputation management, it also brings requirements engineering-related challenges within the ecosystem, such as managing dynamic, emergent contributions from the ecosystem stakeholders, as well as collecting their input while protecting their IP. In this paper, we report from a study of requirements communication and management practices within IBM Ò 's Collaborative Lifecycle Management Ò product development ecosystem. Our research used

Eliciting user requirements for e-collaboration systems: a proposal for a multi-perspective modeling approach

“…We base our discussion on an industrial study manner [46], which is effective and natural. Yet, the difficulty with this manner is in the control of the top down decomposition [28].…”

“…We have seen in Section 5 of the paper that our approach Knauss et al [28] suggested that early involvement of stakeholders in requirements elicitation is crucial in ensuring the success of collaborative systems. Our approach addresses this challenge by asking the stakeholders a set of questions about the system context.…”

“…The study reported by Knauss et al [28] is based on IBM CLM tool suite [25], which is a collaborative platform.…”

“…A summary of requirements elicitation techniques for collaborative systems concerning the 4Cs characteristics (+ notation applied; -notation not Knauss et al[28]. The study identified four RE challenges for collaborative industrial applications.…”

Transparency and contracts

“…To the best of our knowledge, however, research has so far mainly investigated emergent developers [14,31,42] and emergent knowledge [46], while only few and more recent works exist that start to investigate the effect of emergent contributors on requirements [26], across organizations [24,28], and its implications with respect to transparency [8,15]. We consider this an important research direction, since stakeholders with in-depth domain knowledge, the implicit knowledge about customer needs, their business domain and the system's environment [9], must participate even when they span team-or geographic boundaries [5].…”