scholarly journals USABILITY IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: OPINIONS AND PRACTICE

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Sieker Andreasen ◽  
Henrik Villemann Nielsen ◽  
Simon Ormholt Schrøder ◽  
Jan Stage

Open Source Software (OSS) development has gained significant importance in the production of soft-ware products. Open Source Software developers have produced systems with a functionality that is competitive with similar proprietary software developed by commercial software organizations. Yet OSS is usually designed for and by power-users, and OSS products have been criticized for having little or no emphasis on usability. We have conducted an empirical study of the developers’ opinions about usability and the way usability engineering is practiced in a variety of OSS projects. The study included a questionnaire survey and a series of interviews, where we interviewed OSS contributors with both technical and usability backgrounds. Overall we found that OSS developers are interested in usability, but in practice it is not top priority, and OSS projects rarely employs systematic usability evaluation. Most of the efforts are based on common sense. Most developers have a very limited understanding of usability, and there is a lack of resources and evaluation methods fitting into the OSS paradigm.

First Monday ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benno Luthiger ◽  
Carola Jungwirth

The goal of the study on Fun and Software Development (FASD) is to precisely assess the importance that fun has as motivation for software developers to engage in open source projects. A survey carried out both under open source developers and programmers working in Swiss software companies yielded that the fun motive accounts for about 27 percent to 33 percent of open source developers’ motivation. Fun is a pervasive feature of software development, not only for open source programmers but in the area of commercial software development too: Open source developers that are paid for their work are observed to be very motivated and prepared for future effort, especially if they enjoy their development time. Furthermore, the fun that programmers experience functions as a good proxy for their productivity. Therefore, employers that want to enhance the programmers’ productivity can safely invest in an environment of fun for developers in their company.


Author(s):  
Arif Raza ◽  
Luiz Fernando Capretz ◽  
Faheem Ahmed

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are gaining popularity in OSS, usability is still not considered one of the prime objectives in many design scenarios. This paper analyzes industry users’ perception of usability factors, including understandability, learnability, operability, and attractiveness on OSS usability. The research model of this empirical study establishes the relationship between the key usability factors and OSS usability from industrial perspective. In order to conduct the study, a data set of 105 industry users is included. The results of the empirical investigation indicate the significance of the key factors for OSS usability.


2013 ◽  
Vol 373-375 ◽  
pp. 1172-1177
Author(s):  
Bo Shu ◽  
Xiao Jun Du

Because of the complexity of the software development, some software developers may plagiarize source code that comes from other projects or open source software in order to shorten development cycle. Usually the copyist would modify and disguise the source code copied to escape plagiarism detection. So far, most algorithms cant completely detect the source disguised by the copyist, especially cant exactly distinguish between the source code and the plagiaristic code. In this paper, we summarize and analyze the effect of disguised source to the detection process, design the strategy to remove the effect of disguised source, and propose a PDG-based software source code plagiarism detection algorithm. The algorithm can detect the existence of disguised source, so as to find out source code plagiarism. And we propose a heuristic rule to make the detection algorithm have the ability to give the plagiarism direction. Any existing algorithm does not have this function. We prove the availability of the algorithm by experiment.


Author(s):  
Faraz Idris Khan ◽  
Yasir Javed ◽  
Mamdouh Alenezi

<p class="Abstract">Incorporating Open Source Software (OSS) tools in software development is increasing day by day due to their accessibility on the internet. With the advantages of OSS comes disadvantages in terms of security vulnerabilities. Therefore, in this paper, we analyzed four famous open source software tools (i.e. Moodle, Joomla, Flask and VLC media player) which are used by software developers nowadays. For the analysis of each system, security vulnerabilities and weakness were identified, threat models were modeled,and code inspection was performed. The findings are discussed in more details.</p>


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