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.