Exploring usability discussions in open source development

The public nature of discussion in open source projects provides a valuable resource for understanding the mechanisms of open source software development. In this paper we explore how open source projects address issues of usability. We examine bug reports of several projects to characterise how developers address and resolve issues concerning user interfaces and interaction design. We discuss how bug reporting and discussion systems can be improved to better support bug reporters and open source developers

Users’ Perception of Open Source Usability: An Empirical Study

The number of open source software (OSS) users has increased in recent years. No longer are they limited to technically adept software developers. Many believe that the OSS market share could increase tremendously provided OSS had systems that were easier to use. Although examples of good usable open source software exist, it is agreed that OSS can be made more usable. This study presents an empirical investigation to study the impact of some key factors on OSS usability from the end users’ point of view. The research model studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability factors from the users’ perspective and OSS usability. A data set of 102 OSS users from 13 open source projects of various sizes was used to study the research model. The results of this study provide empirical evidence by indicating that the highlighted key factors play a significant role in improving OSS usability

Conception de logiciels libres : enjeux pour l'ergonomie et rôle des utilisateurs dans le processus de conception

International audienceNous proposons un état des lieux des questions que pose la conception des logiciels libres à l'ergonomie. Nous illustrons ce propos à partir d'une recherche sur la participation des utilisateurs au processus de conception de logiciels libres. Nous analysons les interactions, les activités de conception et de partage de connaissances, dans les deux principales listes de discussions de la communauté Python. Nous caractérisons, ainsi, un processus de conception « poussée par les utilisateurs » dans lequel des participants clé, jouent le rôle de médiateurs, en articulant conception et usage. Nous proposons de considérer la conception de logiciels libres comme une forme de conception soutenue par l'émergence de rôles, exprimés spécifiquement en fonction du contexte de la conception, plus qu'une forme de conception basée sur la participation ouverte des utilisateurs

Conception de logiciels libres : enjeux pour l'ergonomie et rôle des utilisateurs dans le processus de conception

International audienceNous proposons un état des lieux des questions que pose la conception des logiciels libres à l'ergonomie. Nous illustrons ce propos à partir d'une recherche sur la participation des utilisateurs au processus de conception de logiciels libres. Nous analysons les interactions, les activités de conception et de partage de connaissances, dans les deux principales listes de discussions de la communauté Python. Nous caractérisons, ainsi, un processus de conception « poussée par les utilisateurs » dans lequel des participants clé, jouent le rôle de médiateurs, en articulant conception et usage. Nous proposons de considérer la conception de logiciels libres comme une forme de conception soutenue par l'émergence de rôles, exprimés spécifiquement en fonction du contexte de la conception, plus qu'une forme de conception basée sur la participation ouverte des utilisateurs

Cross-Participants : fostering design-use mediation in an Open Source Software community

International audienceMotivation - This research aims at investigating emerging roles and forms of participation fostering design-use mediation during the Open Source Software design process Research approach - We compare online interactions for a successful "pushed-by-users" design process with unsuccessful previous proposals. The methodology developed, articulate structural analyses of the discussions (organization of discussions, participation) to actions to the code and documentation made by participants to the project. We focus on the useroriented and the developer-oriented mailing-lists of the Python project. Findings/Design - We find that key-participants, the cross-participants, foster the design process and act as boundary spanners between the users and the developers' communities. Research limitations/Implications - These findings can be reinforced developing software to automate the structural analysis of discussions and actions to the code and documentation. Further analyses, supported by these tools, will be necessary to generalise our results. Originality/Value - The analysis of participation among the three interaction spaces of OSS design (discussion, documentation and implementation) is the main originality of this work compared to other OSS research that mainly analyse one or two spaces. Take away message - Beside the idealistic picture that users may intervene freely in the process, OSS design is boost and framed by some key-participants and specific rules and there can be barriers to users' participatio

Users' participation to the design process in an Open Source Software online community

The objective of this research is to analyse the ways members of open-source software communities participate in design. In particular we focus on how users of an Open Source (OS) programming language (Python) participate in adding new functionalities to the language. Indeed, in the OS communities, users are highly skilled in computer sciences; they do not correspond to the common representation of end-users and can potentially participate to the design process. Our study characterizes the Python galaxy and analyses a formal process to introduce new functionalities to the language called Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) from the idea of language evolution to the PEP implementation. The analysis of a particular pushed-by-users PEP from one application domain community (financial), shows: that the design process is distributed and specialized between online and physical interactions spaces; and there are some cross participants between users and developers communities which may reveal boundary spanners roles

Introducing Usability Activities into Open Source Software Development Projects – Searching for a Suitable Approach

Usability is an important quality characteristic of software products and systems. Different approaches for introducing usability activities into SW development have not yet been evaluated with respect to open source software (OSS). This paper tests the introduction of usability activities through four empirical case studies in the OSS development context. Case studies were carried out using four OSS projects that were not commercially supported. Empirical analysis suggests that usability specialists should become members of the OSS community, but, at the same time, should keep an objective view. The usability activities had substantially more impact when specialists introduced and carried them out as fellow members of the OSS community than as usability consultants from outside the community. The importance of management commitment for usability activities is discussed in the OSS context. The challenge of adapting usability and OSS development philosophies together should be researched further

Improving The Usability of Software Systems Using Group Discussions: A Case Study on Galaxy

Usability problems in software systems cause performance degradation, user dissatisfaction and loss in terms of cost. There is a growing need for the software systems to become more accessible, retrievable and usable for the users. The usability test of a software is conducted by getting the opinions directly from the users and its goal is to identify problems, uncover opportunities and learn about target users' preferences. But accessing real users is very difficult for certain software systems. However, there are many popular user forums such as Stack Overflow, Quora, Stack Exchange, Eclipse Community Forum etc. and people from different domains of knowledge use these forums to ask about their problems and post their concerns. So exploring these forums should provide significant knowledge for getting information about a system's usability issues. Previous studies show that investigating these group discussion forums discovered several usability issues that the system was unaware of such as topic categorization, automatic tag prediction, identifying reproducible codes etc. However, there are many Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMSs) such as Galaxy, Taverna, Kepler, iPlant, VizSciFlow etc. and although these SWfMSs are emerging and important for data extensive research, no study has been done earlier to figure out the usability problems of these systems. Therefore, in this thesis, we take Galaxy, a well-known SWfMS, as our use case. We explore the user forum that Galaxy offers where users ask for help from experts and other Galaxy users. We search for the issues users are discussing in the forum and find out several usability problems in different categories. In our first study, we try to group the usability problems to easily identify them and galaxy community can be informed of the existing usability problems of the system. While exploring the posts, we find a significant percentage (up to 28\%) of them lack tags. If tags are found, they do not reflect the context of the posts properly. This leads to one of the major usability problems for the discussion forums as users will be unable to identify suitable posts without proper tags. Moreover, users will face difficulties to explore the answers in those untagged questions. So in our second study, we try to suggest tags based on the context and proposed a method for automatically suggesting tags. Again in our extensive investigation, we find lots of usability issues but among them, the problem of finding and searching for the appropriate workflows emerges as a great usability problem of the system. Users, especially novice users, ask for workflow design recommendations from the experts but because of the domain-specific nature of SWfMSs, it gets difficult for them to design or implement a workflow according to their new requirements. Any software system's usability is called into question if users face trouble specifying or carrying out certain tasks and are not given the necessary resources. Therefore, to increase the usability of Galaxy, in our third study, we introduce a NLP-based workflow recommendation system where anyone can write their queries using natural language. Our system can recommend the users with the most relevant workflows in return. We develop a tool on the Galaxy platform based on the idea of the proposed method. Lastly, we believe our study findings can guide the Galaxy community to improve and extend the services according to the users' requirements. We are confident that our proposed methods can be applied to any software system to improve the usability of the system by exploring the user forums