A lightweight forum-based distributed requirement elicitation process for open source community

TL;DR

This paper introduces ReqForum, a lightweight, structured forum-based process for requirement elicitation in open source communities, improving requirement collection efficiency and quality through a defined framework and prototype implementation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel framework and process for structured requirement elicitation in forums, along with a prototype demonstrating feasibility and cost-effectiveness.

Findings

The process is feasible and effective.

Prototype SKLSEForum is successfully implemented.

The approach reduces costs and improves requirement quality.

Abstract

Nowadays, lots of open source communities adopt forum to acquire scattered stakeholders' requirements. But the requirements collection process always suffers from the unformatted description and unfocused discussions. In this paper, we establish a framework ReqForum to define the metamodel of the requirement elicitation forum. Based on it, we propose a lightweight forum-based requirements elicitation process which includes six steps: template-based requirements creation, opinions collection, requirements collection, requirements management, capability identification and the incentive mechanism. According to the proposed process, the prototype SKLSEForum is established by composing the Discuz and its existed pulg-ins. The implementation indicates that the process is feasible and the cost is economic.