An Empirical Study of User Support Tools in Open Source Software
This research addresses the problem of understanding effective user support mechanisms for developers and maintainers of open source software, but it is incremental as it builds on existing studies of support tools.
The study investigated the relationship between user support tools and user support in open source software, finding that project trackers, user mailing lists, and updated versions significantly contribute to user support, while documentation and troubleshooting guidelines did not show a significant association.
End users positive response is essential for the success of any software. This is true for both commercial and Open Source Software (OSS). OSS is popular not only because of its availability, which is usually free but due to the user support it provides, generally through public platforms. The study model of this research establishes a relationship between OSS user support and available support tools. To conduct this research, we used a dataset of 100 OSS projects in different categories and examined five user support tools provided by different OSS projects. The results show that project trackers, user mailing lists, and updated versions have a significant role in gaining user support. However, we were unable to find a significant association between user support and documentation, as well as between user support and the troubleshooting guidelines provided by OSS projects.