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®’s Collaborative Lifecycle Management® product development ecosystem. Our research used multiple methods for data collection, including interviews within several ecosystem actors, on-site participatory observation, and analysis of online project repositories. We chart and describe the flow of product requirements information through the ecosystem, how the open communication paradigm in software ecosystems provides opportunities for “just-in-time” RE—and which relies on emergent contributions from the ecosystem stakeholders—, as well as some of the challenges faced when traditional requirements engineering approaches are applied within such an ecosystem. More importantly, we discuss two tradeoffs brought about by the openness in software ecosystems: (1) allowing open, transparent communication while keeping intellectual property confidential within the ecosystem and (2) having the ability to act globally on a long-term strategy while empowering product teams to act locally to answer end users’ context-specific needs in a timely manner. A sufficient level of openness facilitates contributions of emergent stakeholders. The ability to include important emergent contributors early in requirements elicitation appears to be a crucial asset in software ecosystems.

Highlights

  • Recent research has regarded the development of largescale software projects as ecosystems of interacting and interconnected organizations

  • We extend this body of knowledge with findings from a mixed-method empirical study of requirements management practices within IBMÒ’s open-commercial software ecosystem CLMÒ (Collaborative Lifecycle Management)

  • In the presence of these challenges, we found practitioners to rely on two general flows of requirements: Top-down requirements flow Members of the Product Management Committee (PMC), team leads, and developers work with specific artifacts in the CLM issue tracker, as indicated by the top-down requirements flow on the right-hand side of Fig. 1

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Summary

Introduction

Recent research has regarded the development of largescale software projects as ecosystems of interacting and interconnected organizations. One strategy to initiate and maintain a software ecosystem that is becoming popular is the open-commercial approach [21] (a.k.a Extended Software Enterprises [27]) In this approach, organizations open up internal information about the product, development process, and project communication, while maintaining a commercial licensing and copyright model to protect some of the organization’s intellectual property. Organizations open up internal information about the product, development process, and project communication, while maintaining a commercial licensing and copyright model to protect some of the organization’s intellectual property This approach lies between the more extreme approaches on the degree of openness—such as the widely proprietary, closed information flows around a defined set of partners (e.g. SAP) and the completely open information flows found in opensource ecosystems (e.g. IBM’s Eclipse). The increased transparency supports learning from observation and reputation management [12]

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