Addressing User Requirements in Opens Source Software: The Role of Online Forums

TL;DR

This paper investigates how online forums facilitate the identification and addressing of user requirements in open source software, highlighting their importance in improving usability and user satisfaction.

Contribution

It presents an empirical study analyzing 100 OSS projects, demonstrating the significant role of online forums in capturing and fulfilling user needs.

Findings

Online forums effectively identify user requirements.

Forums help address user requests in OSS.

Community engagement improves OSS usability.

Abstract

User satisfaction has always been important in the success of software, regardless of whether it is closed and proprietary or open source software (OSS). OSS users are geographically distributed and include technical as well as novice users. However, it is generally believed that if OSS was more usable, its popularity would increase tremendously. Hence, users and their requirements need to be addressed in the priorities of an OSS environment. Online public forums are a major medium of communication for the OSS community. The research model of this work studies the relationship between user requirements in open source software and online public forums. To conduct this research, we used a dataset consisting of 100 open source software projects in different categories. The results show that online forums play a significant role in identifying user requirements and addressing their requests in open source software.