7.10 Have a hackfest

A hackfest or sprint is a get-together of project contributors which can be a few hours or a few days, ideally on a weekend. There, everyone can talk directly to each other, proposals and problems can be discussed in the group. Developers can ask interface and usability people directly how to ideally implement something in the frontend. When developers are in the same room, they can discuss interaction design using whiteboards, paper prototypes, spoken words, and gestures. But on the Internet, these often aren’t available, making discussions much slower and prone to misunderstandings. Thomas (2008) Hackfests are ideal to present results of usability testing or reviews you did. You can display your work which is not necessarily measurable in lines of code. This helps to build the trust which is most important in cooperating with free software developers: Relevantive stated that when there was no face-to-face contact with the other person, building trust could be the most strenuous task of co-operating with OSS developers. Andreasen et al. (2006, p. 309)