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Adoption of the HTA Technique in the Open Source Software Development Process

Abstract:

The growth in the number of non-developer open source software (OSS) application users and the escalating use of these applications have led to the need and interest in developing usable OSS. OSS communities do not generally know how to apply usability techniques and are unclear about which techniques to use in each activity of the development process. The aim of our research is to adopt the HTA usability technique in the OpenOffice Writer OSS project and determine the feasibility of adapting the technique for application. To do this, we participated as volunteers in the project. We used the case study research method during technique application and participation in the community. As a result, we identified adverse conditions that were an obstacle to technique application and modified the technique to make it applicable to OSS projects. We can conclude from our experience that these changes were helpful for applying the technique, using web artifacts like forums and collaborative tools like Cacoo, although it was not easy to recruit OSS users to participate in usability technique application.