Collaboration in Open Source Domains

Free and open source software (F/OSS) developers have a tendency to build feature-centric projects rather than following a user-centered design, ignoring the necessity of usability in the resulting product. While there are many reasons behind this, the main cause can be stated as the lack of awareness of usability from developers’ point of view and little interaction of project stakeholders with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies. This chapter examines different types of collaboration methods of usability experts and developers focusing particularly on open source projects, together with potential issues envisaged during the communication phases. The chapter also focuses on the collaboration trends and patterns of HCI experts, developers and users with an emphasis on concerns related to inefficient exploitation of current tools and technologies and provide an open usability engineering method which could be exploited in distributed projects