Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 12
Collaboration in Open
Source Domains
A Perspective on Usability
Görkem Çetin
Gebze Institute of Technology, Turkey
Mehmet Göktürk
Gebze Institute of Technology, Turkey
AbstrACt
Free and open source software (F/OSS) developers have a tendency to build feature-centric projects
rather than following a user-centered design, ignoring the necessity of usability in the resulting prod-
uct. While there are many reasons behind this, the main cause can be stated as the lack of awareness
of usability from developers' point of view and little interaction of project stakeholders with Human-
Computer Interaction (HCI) studies. This chapter examines different types of collaboration methods of
usability experts and developers focusing particularly on open source projects, together with potential
issues envisaged during the communication phases. The chapter also focuses on the collaboration trends
and patterns of HCI experts, developers and users with an emphasis on concerns related to inefficient
exploitation of current tools and technologies and provides an open usability engineering method which
could be exploited in distributed projects.
introduCtion
of usage, distribution and modification. A surpris-
ing fact with F/OSS development is that while this
model does not pose an in-line methodology with
traditional software development models, there's
a growing interest in F/OSS products showing an
effective, rapid and reliable software development
process. As of this writing, there are more than
1.5 million registered users in Sourceforge with
more than 150.000 projects and Apache is the clear
market leader with 53% market share according to
Netcraft statistics.
Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is a generic
term that is used for software developed under a
license, which allows the use, modification and dis-
tribution of the software without claiming a fee for
it. There are other terms, like “open source”, which
describe a slightly different version of the F/OSS
term; however the basic idea is the same in terms
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