What do we know about requirements management in software ecosystems?

Abstract

Among the activities in requirements engineering (RE), requirements management ensures that requirements are tracked throughout their life cycle, changes are controlled, and inconsistencies are corrected. Requirements management has become increasingly critical in new ways of developing software and emerging contexts such as software ecosystems (SECO). The changing nature of the SECO introduces complexity in requirements management and results in varied flows of emergent requirements, making managing requirements in SECO challenging. Hence, understanding how requirements management is performed in SECO can help requirements managers improve their practices. This work aims to characterize requirements management in SECO. We have conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS) to achieve this goal. We selected 29 studies using a hybrid search strategy (database search and snowballing). We defined nine characteristics of requirements management in SECO that differentiate it from requirements management in traditional software development. We identified four types of approaches to support requirements management in SECO: tool, method, model, and practice. We found that only three selected studies present an assessment of their approaches. Finally, we characterize requirements management in SECO as an open, informal, collaborative, and decentralized process involving multi-party actors susceptible to power relations.