ACM Interactions

Authors:
Matthias Müller-Prove

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DEVELOPERS ARE USERS TOO. Developers, scratching just their personal itch, are a well-known challenge for open source projects [5]. If the project's target audience is not the typical software engineer and the application's interface becomes too technical, intended users will turn away from the product. As a consequence, more-mature projects have established a culture that values—in addition to source code—contributions from other members such as quality testing, user documentation, globalization, and user experience. The cooperation of all teams with their specific expertise makes a usable and successful product. Usability—or the lack thereof—in open source projects has been discussed during…

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