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

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 cross-community 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 cross-community collaboration behaviors of users. Some important findings are obtained: more than half of the requirements gathered from SO are enhancements and the majority of the gathered requirements are non-functional requirements. In addition, OSS developers can directly obtain related solutions and contributions of the gathered requirements from SO in the gathering process.