Requirements Engineering in Startups with Open Source Software Related Business Strategies

Abstract: The role of startups in today’s economy grows increasingly more important while more and more companies engage in open source software (OSS) development. Both startups and open source projects are sources of, and rely on, innovation. As startups are typically very resource constrained and open source potentially offers low cost labour and innovation sources; the intersection of startups and OSS is worth studying. In this thesis we perform a literature study on the current state of Requirements Engineering (RE) in startups and OSS, showing that the RE process is comparatively more informal in both startups and OSS than what would be the norm in classical RE. We also present interviews with four different startups and examine how they manage their OSS projects through an RE perspective confirming the results from the literature study. In addition we identify a set of RE related challenges faced by the interviewed startups when managing their OSS projects and present potential actions that can be deployed to alleviate the challenges. To further aid the startups in this area we identify four different themes related to the challenges that indicates broader issues in a startups OSS RE bridging process and present a method for identifying areas of improvement in a startup’s ongoing OSS project.