%P 964-968
%T An Empirical Study of User Support Tools in Open Source Software
%V 2019-J
%I IEEE Computer Society
%A A. Raza
%A L.F. Capretz
%A S.B. Basri
%O cited By 0; Conference of 15th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA 2019 ; Conference Date: 16 July 2019 Through 19 July 2019; Conference Code:154552
%L scholars11489
%J IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA
%D 2019
%R 10.1109/ICCA.2019.8899935
%X 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. © 2019 IEEE.
%K Open systems, Empirical studies; End users; Mailing lists; Support tool; User support, Open source software