IT’s all about you
Society is moving from paper to digital systems for recording information. A major challenge is to ensure information, including documents, can still be read for as long as required – decades for government documents, legal agreements, and design documents for example. In practice, documents created today will have a longer lifespan than the software used to create them. Consequently, for a document to be read in the future, the standard specifying the document file format will need to be available, and software engineers will need to be able to recreate working software from the standard. My research investigates how software developers, working for different companies and organisations, collaborate together in open source software projects to create and maintain software that implements standards.
The aim of the research is to understand the types of problems software developers face today when implementing standards and how they find solutions to those problems. The research findings can be used to find better ways for software developers to collaborate, and to improve the ways that standards for documents and data are created and implemented.
Contact:
Post-Doctor, School of Informatics, University of Skövde