A study of usability of Web-based software repositories

Software repositories have a key role to play in software reuse strategies to improve software development productivity. However, repositories have not been conspicuously successful, and have not been able to play their role very successfully, despite improvements in supporting technology, such as the World Wide Web. We speculate that a weakness in repositories is their usability. In this paper, we present a study of the usability of Web-based software repositories, using the "cognitive walkthrough" usability inspection method. We found that repository usability did indeed seem to be a difficulty, and identified several significant points where usability could be improved.