Gathering GitHub OSS Requirements from Q&A Community: an Empirical Study

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates how GitHub OSS projects gather requirements from Stack Overflow Q&A, revealing that most requirements are enhancements and non-functional, with developers benefiting from direct solutions during the process.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of cross-community requirements gathering between GitHub and Stack Overflow, highlighting its characteristics and collaboration behaviors.

Findings

Over half of requirements from Stack Overflow are enhancements.

Most gathered requirements are non-functional.

Developers obtain solutions and contributions directly from Stack Overflow.

Abstract

Cross-community collaboration can exploit the expertise and knowledges of crowds in different communities. Recently increasing users in open source software (OSS) community like GitHub attempt to gather software requirements from question and answer (Q&A) communities such as Stack Overflow (SO). In order to investigate this emerging crosscommunity collaboration phenomenon, the paper presents an exploratory study on cross-community requirements gathering of OSS projects in GitHub. We manually sample 3266 practice cases and quantitatively analyze the popularity of the phenomenon, the characteristics of the gathered requirements, and collaboration behaviors of cross-community. Some important findings are obtained: more than half of the requirements gathered from SO are enhancements and the majority of the gathered requirements arenon-functionalrequirements.Inaddition,OSSdeveloperscan directlyobtainrelatedsolutionsandcontributionsofthegathered requirements from SO in the gathering process.