Software ecosystems (SECOs) and open innovation processes have been claimed
as a way forward for the software industry. A proper understanding of
requirements is as important for these IT-systems as for more traditional ones.
This paper presents a mapping study on the issues of requirements engineering
and quality aspects in SECOs and analyzes emerging ideas. Our findings indicate
that among the various phases or subtasks of requirements engineering, most of
the SECO specific research has been accomplished on elicitation, analysis, and
modeling. On the other hand, requirements selection, prioritization,
verification, and traceability has attracted few published studies. Among the
various quality attributes, most of the SECOs research has been performed on
security, performance and testability. On the other hand, reliability, safety,
maintainability, transparency, usability attracted few published studies. The
paper provides a review of the academic literature about SECO-related
requirements engineering activities, modeling approaches, and quality
attributes, positions the source publications in a taxonomy of issues and
identifies gaps where there has been little research.Comment: Journal of Information Technology Research (JITR) 11(1
