Ingimp: introducing instrumentation to an end-user open source application

Open source projects are gradually incorporating usability methods into their development practices, but there are still many unmet needs. One particular need for nearly any open source project is data that describes its user base, including information indicating how the software is actually used in practice. This paper presents the concept of open instrumentation, or the augmentation of an open source application to openly collect and publicly disseminate rich application usage data. We demonstrate the concept of open instrumentation in ingimp, a version of the open source GNU Image Manipulation Program that has been modified to collect end-user usage data. ingimp automatically collects five types of data: The commands used, high-level user interface events, overall features of the user's documents, summaries of the user's general computing environment, and users' own descriptions of their planned tasks. In the spirit of open source software, all collected data are ma...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Michael Terry, Matthew Kay, Brad Van Vugt, Brandon Slack, Terry Park
• Keywords: CHI 2008, Human Computer Interaction, Keywords Open Source, Open Source, Open Source Application