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.
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Acknowledgements
Work funded by the Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) of the Government of Ecuador as part of an academic scholarship granted for postgraduate training, and Quevedo State Technical University through doctoral scholarships for university professors. Also, this research was funded by the FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation – Research State Agency: project MASSIVE, RTI2018-095255-B-I00, the R&D programme of Madrid (project FORTE, P2018/TCS-4314), and project PGC2018- 097265-B-I00, also funded by: FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation – Research State Agency. Finally, this research received funding from the University of Atacama “DIUDA 22316” project.
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Llerena, R., Rodríguez, N., Llerena, L., Castro, J.W., Acuña, S.T. (2020). Adoption of the HTA Technique in the Open Source Software Development Process. In: Stephanidis, C., Marcus, A., Rosenzweig, E., Rau, PL.P., Moallem, A., Rauterberg, M. (eds) HCI International 2020 - Late Breaking Papers: User Experience Design and Case Studies. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12423. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60114-0_13
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