Towards Better Requirements from the Crowd: Developer Engagement with Feature Requests in Open Source Software
Pragyan KC, Rambod Ghandiparsi, Thomas Herron, John Heaps, Mitra Bokaei Hosseini

TL;DR
This paper examines how open-source developers handle ambiguous feature requests, revealing that clarification is infrequent and often focused on understanding goals rather than technical details, which impacts software development quality.
Contribution
It provides an empirical analysis of clarification practices in OSS, highlighting communication gaps and proposing patterns to improve feature request handling.
Findings
Feature requests often contain ambiguity and incompleteness.
Explicit clarification is infrequent among developers.
When clarification occurs, it focuses on user intent and feasibility.
Abstract
As user demands evolve, effectively incorporating feature requests is crucial for maintaining software relevance and user satisfaction. Feature requests, typically expressed in natural language, often suffer from ambiguity or incomplete information due to communication gaps or the requester's limited technical expertise. These issues can lead to misinterpretation, faulty implementation, and reduced software quality. While seeking clarification from requesters is a common strategy to mitigate these risks, little is known about how developers engage in this clarification process in practice-how they formulate clarifying questions, seek technical or contextual details, align on goals and use cases, or decide to close requests without attempting clarification. This study investigates how feature requests are prone to NL defects (i.e. ambiguous or incomplete) and the conversational dynamics…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsOpen Source Software Innovations · Software Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
