Abstract
For a firm in an open source software (OSS) ecosystem, the requirements engineering (RE) process is rather multifaceted. Apart from its typical RE process, there is a competing process, external to the firm and inherent to the firm’s ecosystem. When trying to impose an agenda in competition with other firms, and aiming to align internal product planning with the ecosystem’s RE process, firms need to consider who and how influential the other stakeholders are, and what their agendas are. The aim of the presented research is to help firms identify and analyze stakeholders in OSS ecosystems, in terms of their influence and interactions, to create awareness of their agendas, their collaborators, and how they invest their resources. To arrive at a solution artifact, we applied a design science research approach where we base artifact design on the literature and earlier work. A stakeholder influence analysis (SIA) method is proposed and demonstrated in terms of applicability and utility through a case study on the Apache Hadoop OSS ecosystem. SIA uses social network constructs to measure the stakeholders’ influence and interactions and considers the special characteristics of OSS RE to help firms structure their stakeholder analysis processes in relation to an OSS ecosystem. SIA adds a strategic aspect to the stakeholder analysis process by addressing the concepts of influence and interactions, which are important to consider while acting in collaborative and meritocratic RE cultures of OSS ecosystems.
Highlights
Firms that use open source software (OSS), e.g., as part of their supporting infrastructure, product strategy, or business model, need to consider the requirements engineering process of the OSS itself [1]
In previous work [30], we explored how centrality measures could be used to characterize the influence of stakeholders within an OSS ecosystem, and how this evolved over time
This study proposes the stakeholder influence analysis (SIA) method which aims to help firms involved in OSS ecosystems to characterize ecosystem’s stakeholders according to their level of influence on the ecosystem’s requirements engineering (RE) process
Summary
Firms that use open source software (OSS), e.g., as part of their supporting infrastructure, product strategy, or business model, need to consider the requirements engineering process of the OSS itself [1]. This second, external to the focal firm, RE process is facilitated by the software ecosystem (cf OSS community [2]) that surrounds the OSS [3]. We consider a person or an organization as the members of an OSS ecosystem, and the system being the OSS that underpins the ecosystem, using the definition by Jansen et al [3]
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