Abstract
Many open source software (OSS) hosting platforms serve the software engineering community such as GitHub and SourceForge. During OSS development, some work items (e. g. features, defects, enhancements) must be completed before others. Dependencies between work items should be managed in order to help team members in scheduling their work. Currently, none of the popular OSS platforms offers an effective way to manage dependencies between elements of work. This research aims at supporting collaboration among developers using OSS platforms through providing process models managing the dependencies among work items. In order to do so, we conducted in-depth interviews with a set of practitioners who use the current OSS platforms to discover what are the most important dependencies that can benefit from computer-based support. The interviews revealed five different types of dependency which, among them, we designed process models for two.