Abstract
In the company open source software (OSS) development context, usability is becoming an important issue due to a growing user population, who is only interested in usable applications, not in their development. Companies try to gain a competitive advantage of OSS by utilizing available components, but the openness is difficult to achieve in the business world with licenses, patents and intellectual property rights. This paper analyses usability and user-interface (UI) development in the company OSS context through an interpretive case study in a software development unit of a large, global corporation. Our initial findings suggest that there is a need for human computer interaction specialists in the OSS context. It is revealed that with the software based on OSS, more time can be spent on usability and UI design. In the company’s viewpoint, there are still many issues involved in deciding what parts of the product will be open source. Especially UI code may remain closed due to competitive advantage and patents.
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Keywords
- Open Source Software
- User Feedback
- Open Source Software Project
- Visual Display Terminal
- Usability Engineer
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© 2008 International Federation for Information Processing
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Iivari, N., Hedberg, H., Kirves, T. (2008). Usability in Company Open Source Software Context - Initial Findings from an Empirical Case Study. In: Russo, B., Damiani, E., Hissam, S., Lundell, B., Succi, G. (eds) Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. OSS 2008. IFIP – The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 275. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09684-1_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09684-1_33
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-09683-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-09684-1
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