Balancing act: community and local requirements in an open source development process

Established best practices in software development tend to assume that a product's intended stakeholders (i.e., users, customers, and clients) are fairly well known and generally accessible. This paper outlines specific issues faced by those who conduct requirements analysis in the context of open source projects in which the user communities are widely distributed. The examples described are drawn from the experience of managing tool development within the Sakai Project [1], a higher education effort to build and share a community source framework for supporting on-line collaboration in academic courses and projects. With a far-flung community of users and developers, this project requires new approaches to eliciting, analyzing, and prioritizing user needs. The issues outlined in this paper are currently being met by a preliminary set of solutions that makes use of web-based project management technologies. These technologies along with some planning and communication strategies help improve the decision-making process involved in deciding whether and how to choose among proposed constraints, use cases, and feature requests.