Requirements Bazaar is an Open Source project developing a social continuousinnovation platform on the Web to bring together users, developers andoperators. It is available at https://requirements-bazaar.org. End users canenter their ideas, requirements or bug reports by providing short descriptionsincluding textual descriptions and images. The requirements can then be votedand shared. Developers may take up ideas at any time to transfer the acceptedrequirements to an issue tracker like GitHub Issues. At FOSDEM 2017 we wouldlike to present our ongoing work in keeping our responsive single-page Webapplication performant using Web Components, and discuss new ideas with thecrowd!
As developers, we have to acknowledge, that in most software projects there isa huge imbalance between millions of users on one hand, and a small amount ofdevelopers on the other hand. Additionally, we experienced that our users areour most precious source of innovative and often disruptive ideas about how toimprove our software. That's why we are convinced it is important to providefeedback mechanisms so that users can easily report bugs or feature requests.In many of our development projects we tried out various means to do justthat: users were guided to issue trackers like the ones provided by GitHub orJIRA, forums, emails or simple app store comments. The solutions were eithernot easy enough for users or simply did not scale well for developers.Commercial solutions didn't exactly fit our expectations or budget. Then wecame up with Requirements Bazaar! :) Requirements Bazaar is an Open Sourcesocial continuous innovation platform to bring together users, developers andoperators. It is freely available under https://requirements-bazaar.org and iscurrently hosting multiple interesting projects. Besides managing theinnovation of our research projects, we see users adopting it for variousexciting societal purposes like the digitalization processes of Afghanistan orcreating the new IEEE standard for Augmented Reality learning.
This is how our Web app works: End users can enter their requirements byproviding short descriptions including use cases, screenshots and otherimages. The requirements can then be voted and shared. Then, developers maytake up ideas and transfer the discussed requirements to an issue tracker likeGitHub Issues.
At FOSDEM 2017 we would like to encourage Open Source developers and designersin rethinking the way requirements are currently gathered from the crowd. Howdo we want to collect new software ideas or simply feature requests from ourusers? Is it effective to provide feedback forms in our apps’ “About” menu? Doour users think in terms of issues like we developers do? How can gamificationbe used to reward actual end-users of software? We hope Requirements Bazaarcan answer these questions and fill the gap!
We are also happy to talk about our experiences developing a performantresponsive single-page Web application with Web Components using Polymer. |