Understanding Continuous Design in F/OSS Projects
Les Gasser, Gabriel Ripoche, Walt Scacchi, Bryan Penne · 2003
Open Source Software (OSS) is in regular widespread use supporting critical applications and infrastructure, including the Internet and World Wide Web themselves. The communities of OSS users and developers are often interwoven. The deep engagement of users and developers, coupled with the openness of systems lead to community-based system design and re-design activities that are continuous. Continuous redesign is facilitated by communication and knowledgesharing infrastructures such as persistent chat rooms, newsgroups, issuereporting /tracking repositories, sharable design representations and many kinds of "software informalisms." These tools are arenas for managing the extensive, varied, multimedia community knowledge that forms the foundation and the substance of system requirements. Active community-based design processes and knowledge repositories create new ways of learning about, representing, and defining systems that challenge current models of representation and design. This paper presents several aspects of our research into continuous, open, community-based design practices. We discuss several new insights into how communities represent knowledge and capture requirements that derive from our qualitative empirical studies of large (ca. 2GB+) repositories of problem-report data, primarily from the Mozilla project.