Differences between traditional and open source development activities

  • Authors:

  • John Wilmar Castro Llanos;Silvia Teresita Acuña Castillo

  • Affiliations:

  • Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

  • Venue:
  • PROFES'12 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The growing importance of open source software (OSS) has led researchers to study how OSS processes differ from traditional software engineering processes. The aim of this study is to determine the differences and similarities between development process activities (requirements, design, and implementation) enacted by the OSS community and established by IEEE Standard 1074:2006. We conducted a systematic mapping study to find out which activities are part of the OSS development process. We identified a total of 22 primary studies. Of these, 46% described activities related to the requirements process, just over 60% reported activities related to design and almost all accounted for activities related to implementation. The OSS community does not enact prescriptive software engineering models. OSS requirements are evolved using several different web artefacts, as well as through continual interactions in forums and via messaging. Requirements are asserted rather than elicited. A common feature of all OSS projects is that software system design and implementation is modular. The priority in the OSS community is implementation. Anyone, developers or users, can make contributions, including designs and code.