Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Codeplex, OSS Research

Bridging Chasms

Paula Bach — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:57:00 GMT

I have blogged previously about interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Now I want to turn to disciplinary chasms in software development. Social aspects such as how people communicate, collaborate, and coordinate interest me because as Andy Begel in the HIP group in MSR found, software development teams when coordinating and communicating with other teams, are like dysfunctional families. I won’t go into details, but software development is socially complex. Software development teams generally consist of software engineers, to state the obvious. But in the last ten years or so, many software development businesses began to implement user-centered design because they realized that software could be frustrating for users. A new discipline arose where people were either trained in Human Computer Interaction, or learned on the job. Professional organizations like UPA and SIGCHI are thriving. But software engineers and usability experts are from different communities of practice. Although they both work on creating software products, their goals, values, approaches, culture, and well, their work practices differ tremendously.

A theoretical approach called communities of practice helps to describe and explain the social nature of learning and interacting in communities. But the approach does not yet incorporate multidisciplinary communities or how two communities of practice come together to accomplish their goals, like designing and building software.

In my experience, through being a designer practicing user-centered design and a researcher studying user-centered design in software development practices, about half of any design practice is communicating your ideas across disciplines or communities of practice and actively listening and working to understand different perspectives. Other practitioners echo this observation as well: Gitta Salomon of swimstudio.com, an interaction design firm, states that “One of the biggest challenges is remembering that half of what we do is the design work and the other half is the communication of that design work.” (Quoted from the book Interaction Design, by Preece, Rogers, and Sharp. This book is an excellent guide, both theoretically based and practical, most people trained in HCI will know about 80% of what is in this book and apply aspects everyday.)

Bridging software development and user-centered design could be investigated by looking at communities of practice and paying attention to communication could help bridge the chasm between the two disciplines.

CodePlex project developers wanted

Paula Bach — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:14:00 GMT

I would like to invite CodePlex developers to participate in research. If you have been reading my blog posts here on Port25, then you will know that I have been investigating how to integrate usability into open source software development. Now I am seeking research volunteers.

I am looking for developers who are working on projects hosted on CodePlex. The projects could be in the planning stage, alpha, beta, or stable. As a volunteer, you would be asked questions about your activities performed on CodePlex. The interview should not take longer than 60-90 minutes.

Data from the research will be used to help design support for usability on CodePlex and analyzed as part of my dissertation at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. I work with Dr. John M. Carroll at Penn State and Rob DeLine at Microsoft Research. One part of the study data collected from CodePlex users will inform the design of new usability support features. The other part of the study is to understand how developers work on open source projects. This research has been approved by The Pennsylvania State University Institutional Research Board, IRB #27804. As such, data will be used for the above research purposes only.

If you would like to participate, (participation is voluntary) or have any questions, please email codeplexresearch@live.com.

Go Hybrid

Paula Bach — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:29:00 GMT

I am back in Redmond. For those of you who don’t know, I spent last summer here in the open source software lab conducting research on integrating usability into open source. My last blog talked about how I have made some changes to my research program. One change is to situate the research argument within the broader scope of how open source has been changing. My favorite paper discussing this is titled “The transformation of Open Source Software” by Brian Fitzgerald and is only available if you have a subscription to the MISQ journal, but you can download an audio mp3 version read by Fitzgerald himself here. He coins the term ‘open source 2.0’ and characterizes software development in open source and compares it to proprietary, and shows that open source software development has elements of proprietary software development and proprietary has elements of open source. Any of the big open source projects with paid developers, and my favorite example, Mozilla, with paid UX professionals, is an example of the former, while Microsoft is an example of the latter. When I first met Bryan Kirschner (now director of open source strategy at Microsoft) he introduced me to the idea that API developer communities are a lot like open source communities.

The most interesting part of my research is that it is situated right in the middle of open source hybridization. A hybrid open source software development model combines a business model, either open source or proprietary, and open, two-way community input. The basis of my argument for the research is as follows: open source software development has been so successful that proprietary companies have been paying attention to incorporating open source strategies into their business model and very successful open source projects have had business models created around them. Both of these phenomena share some characteristics of software development, but taking a well-developed model of usability and transplanting it into a hybrid software development environment will be challenging because the hybridization landscape is still being cultivated. Because Microsoft has been successful with integrating usability activities into its production of software, it makes an interesting case to investigate how one of their hybridization strategies, CodePlex, integrates usability.

I am working with the CodePlex team to develop usability support for CodePlex. This means that the CodePlex community will have a say in how we design the support. Traditionally, open source projects are challenged for usability resources so the support has to range from being able to support code-centered and usability-interested developers to the possibility of usability professionals. The project addresses three main challenges for usability in open source: merit and trust, chasm between work activities, and incommensurable tools and methods. If you have a project on CodePlex and are interested in participating in this research, then please contact me: codeplexresearch at live dot com.

Passing Without Talking

Paula Bach — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:29:00 GMT

My last blog was about me traveling to Limerick and Toronto. I have now defended my dissertation proposal and passed. (Yay!) Here is a funny story. A week before the proposal defense I created my presentation and rehearsed it every day until the third day before when I began to get a sore throat. I don’t think it was from rehearsing the presentation or nerves or anything like that. Instead it was just a bug that was going around. Lots of students are sick at the end of fall semester. Anyway, two days before my defense I was getting a froggy voice, so I did not talk all day long. The day before the defense my voice was really raspy. The night before I worked on saving my larynx by gargling with salt water and any remedy I could find online. I woke up at 4AM the day of the defense and tried to speak a word. Nothing but a squawk came out. I had lost my voice. Because it is really difficult to get committee members together, the show had to go on. So at 9AM I stood up in front of my committee and a few fellow graduate students and began to squawk my way through the well-rehearsed presentation. It was not fun to look at the audience trying not to look disturbed at the sound of my voice.

Finally, after about the fifth slide, one committee member stopped me and asked the rest if they could just go into the discussion and skip the presentation. Everyone agreed and I listened to 5 professors, all of whom I respect a great deal discuss the merits and faults of my research. It was really an enlightening experience because I cannot think of another time when I will get five really smart people in one room discussing my research to make it better. In the end I came out with some ideas to rework my plan. The committee agreed that I was trying to do too much and advised that I choose one of the two parts. The first part, understanding FLOSS usability in general through the survey, observations, and interviews is almost done, and I have learned a lot, but the second part, designing a tool for CodePlex to support usability activities is not only more interesting, but also part of the agreement between IST and Microsoft. I came up with a new direction based on more literature I have gathered. The first exciting addition is the use of a theory to guide the design and research. I will use activity theory because it can handle people, both from an individual and social level, and artifacts. It also considers context and the dynamics of activities. Other HCI theories, for example, distributed cognition, handle people at the individual and social levels, and artifacts, but does not specifically take into account context and dynamics of activities. I am also using a methodological approach called action research. Action research is a practical approach to research where solving problems leading to intervention is a collaborative act between researcher and practitioner. I am a practical kind of researcher so this approach suited the project and me best.

I will be working with Microsoft UX people and the CodePlex team to integrate usability support for the CodePlex community site. I will also be working with a few projects hosted on CodePlex to help with the design.

[PostIcon:4037]

10th European Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW) Conference - Limerick, Ireland

Paula Bach — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:22:00 GMT

I’ve been on the road..

In September, I went to Limerick, Ireland for the 10th European Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW) conference. Computer-supported cooperative work is a sub-sub-discipline of computerscience and a sub-discipline of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). CSCW researchers look at groupware, how people collaborate, and tools that support collaboration. They also do ethnographies to find out how people collaborate. Jonathan Grudin in MSR has researched extensively in CSCW and came up with an early idea called critical mass, which refers to the success of groupware. One of the tenets for groupware to succeed is for it to reach critical mass. This means that many people use the system. If only a few people use the groupware system, after a while, it will fail.

I participated in the doctoral colloquium. This venue is a common event at academic conferences where graduate students get informal feedback about their research from established researchers in the field. I received helpful feedback including advice about characterizing the HCI and OSS communities and finding out what the different members of OSS communities think usability is. The nice thing is that I have this information in the OSS survey data.

I had not been to Ireland before, and have not been in Europe since 1989. Limerick and Ireland in general are experiencing an economic boom, mostly because of the IT industry. Young folks have nice clothes, nice cars, and do lots of drinking. The conference dinner was held at at the Bunratty Castle. It was really nice and full of history.

I had an interesting conversation with Volker Wulf. He has written two books that are interesting for my work, but in the conversation I had with him, I was describing my research to him and he asked me about the tool that I will be designing for CodePlex. I mentioned that the project is sponsored by Microsoft and is a joint effort with CodePlex and MSR. He said, and I quote, “Micosoft doesn’t do open source.” And I emphatically replied, “yes they do!” I talked about CodePlex, Port25 and the open source website.

Now Europe knows.

Last week I was at the Free Open Source Software Symposium in Toronto, Canada. I like visiting the homeland, even though I am from the other side of Canada. The annual symposium is an effort put on by Seneca College School of Computer Studies in the greater Toronto area. The applied program offers courses in open source software development. The courses are in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation. Several Mozilla developers come to the college to talk about open source. Because of this partnership and because of their focus on open technologies, they have established a niche program dedicated to open systems. Bryan Kirschner (of Port25 fame), Mike Beltzner (of Firefox User Experience fame), Bob Young (of Red Hat fame), and many other key players in open source were there. I presented some findings from my open source survey and received good feedback. It was the first timeI had looked at the data in a while and there are some interesting things going on. One is that it appears that most of the people who responded to the survey call themselves usability advocates. It will be interesting to see how advocacy plays out in terms
of usability expertise.

I interviewed Mike Beltzner and a couple of people from the Fluid Project. I got some more names of people to interview and after I get my dissertation proposal written and defend it, I will go full steam ahead with interviewing. I can’t wait. I am in consultation with a couple of statisticians for ways to analyze the survey data from both the Microsoft and OSS surveys. I am working with some other graduate students to look at the role of usability expertise in Microsoft, using the data from the internal studies. This will be interesting to see the difference between the two software development environments with respect to the role of usability expertise.

Well that’s the news from Penn State.

Kudos to Open Source Developers

jcannon — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 16:30:00 GMT

I see my last couple posts were about ambiguity, so I thought today I’d blog about something, IMO, that is not ambiguous at all—and the topic would be a fitting hat tip to Sara and Korby and all the folks involved with CodePlex.

Brief background: We had to buy our own combination padlocks on our lockers in my high school. I used to forget the combination all the time (—I still have nightmares about that). I finally solved this by writing my combination in hex on the back of the lock. (I figured there was only one other kid in my class who would know what 0F was in base-10, so if anything was ever missing, I’d know where to look. )

I tell this little anecdote because it made me think about the lack of a community of folks with similar interests in my little world back then. The only reason I knew hex* went back years earlier to a similar lack of community: I couldn’t get a game I was writing on my Commodore 64 to do some things fast enough in BASIC, so I asked my Dad what else I could do and he explained what Assembly language was, and from then on there were lots of nights when I was supposed to be asleep, sitting there in my pajamas, banging away in 6502 Assembly land—by myself.

This was long before the concept of a home modem would have ever occurred to us, never mind the modern Internet’s enablement of community and collaborative development--but I can’t help but wonder what a difference it might have made to me (never mind the quality of that game!) if there had been a more readily accessible community of folks interesting in collaborating and mentoring at that time.

What does this have to do with praising open source developers? This week, inspired by CodePlex, I was looking back at two of the most important studies of the motivations of open source developers. In the two studies (Ghosh in 2002 and Lakhani (PDF) in 2004—both are available online), although slightly different sets of questions were asked, by a notable margin the leading responses were “Learn and develop new skills” and “Share knowledge and skills” (Ghosh) and “Code for project is intellectually stimulating to write” and ‘Improve programming skills” (Lakhani). What’s even more striking about this is comparing these types of motivations—about learning and sharing—with more “confrontational” motivations. Developers could choose multiple answers in both studies, and, for example, in the Lakhani study four times as many volunteer developers chose “Improve programming skills” as a reason for joining an open source community than “Dislike proprietary software and want to defeat them.”

To be clear, anybody’s reason is valid to them--but I am a person who would rather learn than win. That’s true when I write code, it’s true when I play soccer; I think that is a good way to view the world—and from all the research I’ve seen, the evidence is compelling that folks who voluntarily participate in open source development communities place very high value on learning and sharing their knowledge with others. I don’t have comparable data at hand, but I’m willing to believe it is well higher than the average person in the population at large. And for that—kudos. I think that means there are far more opportunities for kids like I once was not just because of technological advances, but because of people—maybe people like you reading this post.

*I actually can’t remember if I stumbled across hex first in Traveller, where, as I recall the descriptive strings for character attributes and planets where in hex—come on, don’t snicker, you know you played it too…