Senin, 02 Maret 2009

Open Resources ERP - Engennering

Supporting Participatory Requirement Engineering in
an ERP Software Community

Abstract. The paper presents a prototype1 aiming to widen user participation in requirement engineering for an open source ERP software company. The prototype utilizes a set of templates in a wiki system to allow community participation, and yet maintain necessary processes and models in the software development. The prototype informs developers about the ongoing work of others, in part to avoid conflicts. An XML-based infrastructure is being developed to improve interoperability with other tools such as discussion forums, issue tracking and documentation systems, to further utilize community efforts in software development.

Keywords: requirement engineering, participatory, community, collaboration.

1 Introduction
Participatory and collaborative software engineering has drawn much attention in recent years [1]. In fact, requirement engineering is participatory by its nature. Requirements engineering consists of the cohesive collection of all tasks performed by various stakeholders related to the identification, analysis, specification, and management of requirements [2]. Requirements engineering is the key bridge between users, system analysts, developers and other stakeholders of a software system. As software becomes the core of business processes, and software development becomes an integral part of the global economy, the roles of users, system analysts and other stakeholders are continuously blended.
With the increasing use of packaged software and industry acceptance of interorganizational collaboration, the “participatory” need of requirement engineering has to be stressed. Compared to proprietary systems, off-the-shelf software packages have much larger stakeholder communities. Information sharing, reuse and web collaboration have gained industry acceptance and even become part of the industry culture, as evident from active user groups and discussion forums in many commercial software communities and the success of open source software. However, the existing collaboration tools for requirement engineering do not always scale to support larger stakeholder communities. The rapid advance of technology (such as Unified Modeling Lanugage) and the deployment cost of software tools often raise the barrier of entry for participation. 
This paper presents a prototype developed to support participatory requirement engineering for an open source ERP software company. The prototype aims to widen and utilize community participation. In the following sections, I first review a research roadmap for collaboration in software engineering, which will be used as a framework in subsequent discussion. Then I describe the software company and its needs for collaboration tools when trying to widen community participation in requirement engineering. I will present the prototype and preliminary results. The paper is concluded with a discussion of the next steps.

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