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. This study tests this approach in two cases and finds that the consultative approach has very little impact. Two further case studies, which use a participative role instead of a consultative role, suggest that usability specialists should become recognized members of the OSS community rather than parachuting in as consultants. This study is the first to examine management commitment in connection to usability activities in the OSS development context. Furthermore, this study has practical implications related to using student groups as usability specialists to introduce usability into OSS projects and related to advising these usability infiltrations as a whole. The study provides evidence that usability activities in the OSS development context have greater impact when the usability specialists become members of the OSS community and act as peers and fellow members within the community rather than as consultants. a summary of findings was written as a report. The report included test objectives, test settings, tests tasks, positive feedback from test users, severity scale for usability issues, usability issues found in tests, and an overall summary. Usability issues listed in the report included a description of each issue, complete with screenshots, the user tasks where the issue was found, steps taken to replicate the issue, a severity rating for the usability issue, and proposed changes to the user interface to remove the issue. institutionalized activity should also be researched. A more action-research-oriented approach could be utilized in prospective studies in the OSS context. Finally, one could study further how far the usability activities and processes can be adapted into OSS development philosophy without compromising the core HCI philosophies and how OSS development practices could be adapted to enable easier incorporation of usability activities without compromising the core OSS development philosophies. We have done a validation study with a similar OSS development project as UKKOSS 2 and with a similar approach for introducing usability. The usability team conducted testing and redesign, while the code team implemented the changes to some parts of the user interface and communicated the necessities of these changes to the core-developers and community. Our initial finding from this study is that the code team can more readily establish themselves within the community and communicate usability problems, needs for change, and benefits of better usability to the core-developers by backing up their arguments with an already working code and, in this way, gain prestige among their peers.