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An Assessment of the Usability Quality Attribute in Open Source Software

Usability is one of the important quality attributes. Open source software products are well known for their efficiency and effectiveness. Lack of usability in OSS (Open Source Software) products will result in poor usage of the product. In OSS development there is no usability team, and one could therefore expect that the usability would be low for these products. In order to find out if this was really the case we made a usability evaluation using a questionnaire for four OSS products. The questionnaire was based on a review of existing literature. This questionnaire was presented to 17 people who are working with open source products. This evaluation showed that the overall usability was above average for all the four products. It seems, however, that the lack of a usability team has made the OSS products less easy to use for inexperienced users. Based on the responses to questionnaire and a literature review, a set of guidelines and hints for increasing the usability of OSS products was defined.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:bth-2193
Date January 2010
CreatorsYelleswarapu, Mahesh Chandra
PublisherBlekinge Tekniska Högskola, Sektionen för datavetenskap och kommunikation
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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