Problem
Open source projects use bug trackers to track defects and features. Trackers facilitate collaboration between developers and end users of a project. However, trackers are designed by developers for developers. Non technical users find the bug trackers to be an hard to use system, hence their voice is not heard in the development of open source projects.
Prototypes
Deliverables
Personas and Scenarios
Final Report
Instructor: Mark Ackerman
Course: SI689 – Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Teammates: Jakob Hilden, Mohammad Hadhrawi & Ning Wang
Process
Our team studied the problem and designed a solution to bridge this “socio-technical” gap. To narrow our scope, we chose to solve the problem making it easier to submit issues to an open source web application. To collect user data, we interviewed seven users who participated in open source projects in various roles like developers, project managers, and bug triagers, in active projects like Firefox and Ubuntu. We did a competitive evaluation of the trackers Trac, Bugzilla, Launchpad and SourceForge.
We designed and implemented a web-based widget to communicate with the bug tracker from the host application (WordPress). The widget provides a friendly environment for the user to communicate with a tracker. It also offloads some bug triaging effort from developers to end users by encouraging them to indicate similar defects.
My Role
I seeded the idea to create a bridge between the end user application and tracker. I conducted a couple of interviews and the competitive evaluation. The latter showed our team the social component of bug tracker. I implemented the web widget using YUI JS library to interact with the bug tracker. With the rest of the team, I presented our research findings and solution.