REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING (RE) EFFECTIVENESS IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORK CONFIGURATIONS AND REQUIREMENTS PROPERTIES.

As open source software (OSS) development projects have become popular, requirements engineering (RE) practices in OSS development have come under scrutiny for their marked difference. The current study views OSS RE as knowledge propagation expressed in coordinated sequences of action interrupted and shaped by the demands of an ever-changing environment resulting in multiple social network configurations. The attributes of environment are manifested in the changing nature of requirements that the projects are subjected to and based on the 6-V requirements model involving 6 properties of requirement knowledge such as volume or volatility. The diverse network configurations in OSS projects manifested in communication centrality responding to those demands, in turn, will have varying effects on OSS project effectiveness measured by the rate of task completion. We hypothesize that the volume of requirements and their velocity of change negatively moderate the positive effect of communication centrality on the project's task completion whereas the variance (diversity) of requirements knowledge positively moderates the positive effect of communication centrality on task completion. The hypotheses of the study are tested using a sample of GitHub OSS projects and we find support to most hypotheses. Several implications for OSS governance are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]