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A master's thesis from Aalborg University
Book cover


Early Open Source Development: Reports on Bootstrapping an Open Source Project with Distributed Users

Term

4. term

Publication year

2020

Submitted on

Pages

75

Abstract

The subject of this master’s thesis is concerned with three related areas of interest; open source development, software engineering processes and tools, and the domain of qualitative research and how these researchers use tools for qualitative coding. The purpose is to explore each area and their relation, through developing an open source real-time collaborative coding tool. We report on findings made throughout three phases of distributed development, where each phase is concluded with a demo. We conclude that implementing a real-time collaboration tool as a web application can be done with a distributed architectural pattern, where the server side uses the socket.io component to ensure consist data between clients. For early stage low-overhead, rapid feedback, we use UserReport, a tool compatible with all web applications in order to get feedback from an anonymous group of users. The primary results are summarized in the implications: Early technology familiarization requires considerable time investment and can be difficult to estimate and A distributed team needs heavier methodology weight than a collocated team, and adjusting it requires intentional efforts.

The subject of this master’s thesis is concerned with three related areas of interest; open source development, software engineering processes and tools, and the domain of qualitative research and how these researchers use tools for qualitative coding. The purpose is to explore each area and their relation, through developing an open source real-time collaborative coding tool. We report on findings made throughout three phases of distributed development, where each phase is concluded with a demo. We conclude that implementing a real-time collaboration tool as a web application can be done with a distributed architectural pattern, where the server side uses the socket.io component to ensure consist data between clients. For early stage low-overhead, rapid feedback, we use UserReport, a tool compatible with all web applications in order to get feedback from an anonymous group of users. The primary results are summarized in the implications: Early technology familiarization requires considerable time investment and can be difficult to estimate and A distributed team needs heavier methodology weight than a collocated team, and adjusting it requires intentional efforts.