**7. Conclusions and future research**

The goal of this research was to evaluate the feasibility of adopting HCI usability techniques in OSS projects. We adapted the focus groups technique for adoption. Through adaptation, we were able to account for some OSS development characteristics that pose an obstacle to the application of the technique as per HCI recommendations (for example, OSS developers and users are geographically distributed). In particular, we adapted the focus groups usability technique for application in the ERMaster OSS project.

It is not easy to recruit volunteer users to participate in OSS usability projects. As already mentioned, users often do not have much time, and it is hard to get them to take part without an incentive. With the focus groups technique, although we did not get much collaboration from users or even the principal developers, we did manage to apply the technique because it requires only a small number of participants to get a reliable result [14, 15, 34–36]. Author opinions differ as to the number of users to be taken into account for the focus groups technique to be successful [14, 15, 34–36]. Most of these authors agree that a focus group should include from six to nine users if it is to work. Fewer than six participants would not generate enough ideas for discussion. In this research, however, any users that are willing to collaborate are allowed to, that is, there is no limit on the number of users because this would go against the working philosophy of the OSS community where anyone who wants to is welcome to participate. In sum, our proposed adaptation does not place any constraints on the number of technique participants. This adaptation is a response to the OSS community working philosophy rather than to an adverse condition posing an obstacle to technique application.

The focus groups technique is useful for gathering opinions and suggestions from participant users for the product concept development activity and its results are descriptive. After analysing and applying the focus groups usability technique in requirements engineering activities in OSS developments, we found that there are adverse conditions that are an obstacle to its application like, for example, the shortage of OSS users interested in applying the technique, community geographical and temporal distribution and OSS community motivation.

We believe that, in order to improve the integration of usability techniques in OSS projects, the OSS community has to start attaching importance to and raising awareness about the repercussions that the issues addressed by the HCI field have on software development. Additionally, as HCI techniques need to be adapted to overcome the adverse conditions for adoption in OSS development projects, the OSS community also has to broaden its view of software development in order to consider usability and not focus exclusively on feature development. In the future, we aim to conduct further case studies to adapt and apply other usability techniques in OSS projects. We will analyse other web artefacts that can be adapted to improve communication in OSS communities (e.g., social networks) and gradually raise the awareness of OSS developers about the benefits of applying HCI usability techniques.
