Evolutionary Software Requirements Factors and their Effect on Open Source Project Attractiveness

Abstract

Successful projects effectively manage their requirements. How the mix of different requirements evolves throughout a successful project life-cycle is poorly understood. Moreover, requirements practices may be changing, according to the authors of the New RE—a model of six critical requirements factors. The New RE focuses on leveraging existing components to create new functionality. This practice is also central to open-source development. Thus, to understand the proposed New RE model and its relationship to open-source development, in this study, we analyze over 200 projects from GitHub.com and compare them with a prior analysis of 31 projects from SourceForge. The results show that many of the proposed New RE factors are related to project attractiveness, which is important for open-source project success.