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End User in Charge - Social Framework for Open Source Development

Authors:
Kwabena Ebo Bennin
Mohammed Alqadhi
Shahid Hussain
Arif Ali Khan
Solomon Mensah
Ernest Pobee

Keywords: Open Source Software; OSS; End User; Crowdsourcing; Social development.

Abstract:
Open Source Software (OSS) is often developed in a public collaborative manner. Online OSS repositories such as GitHub, Google Code and SourceForge support collaborative OSS development by offering services such as subversion management, bug tracking and others. However, OSS mostly favors end-users who are programmers or have some pre-requisite programming skills. The normally short README description file provided by the OSS developers does not contain enough information to help the novice end-users who intend to use the software in terms of installation and usage. Also, despite being equipped with social coding feature to support distributed multi-developer work environment, most OSS repositories provide only a storage space for the OSS files and this limits end-users just to their bugs/review comments on a different platform and naturally, people would also like to be key stakeholders like changing the functionality and accessibility of software they could use. Some online OSS repositories do not make provision for users to frequently communicate with the developers of the OSS to discuss about the published content on the repository. In this paper, we propose a social framework for OSS development to address the aforementioned issues. The framework is aimed to allow: (1) knowing the degree of matching between the sought user’s requirements and the available OSS by presenting the end-user with the business domain model of a candidate OSS associated to its textual requirements description and (2) a lifetime communication between the users and OSS developers and even inviting other developers out of the OSS development team if needed.

Pages: 77 to 81

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: February 21, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8394

ISBN: 978-1-61208-458-9

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 21, 2016 to February 25, 2016