Abstract:
This tutorial presents an overview of the role of ethnography in Software Engineering research. It describes the use of ethnographic methods as a means to provide an in-depth understanding of the socio-technological realities surrounding everyday software development practice. The knowledge gained can be used to improve processes, methods and tools as well as develop observed industrial practices. The tutorial starts with a brief historical account of ethnography in the fields of Software Engineering, CSCW, Information Systems and other related areas. This sets the stage for a more in-depth discussion of methods for data collection and analysis used in ethnographic studies. It follows by describing how these methods can be and have been used by software engineering researchers to understand developers’ work practices, to inform the development of processes, methods and tools and to evaluate the applicability of current processes, methods and tools. Finally, it discusses some practical issues concerning the selection and use of ethnographic methods by software engineers.
Presenters:
Helen Sharp is Professor of Software Engineering at The Open University, UK. Her main research interest focuses on understanding the social nature of software development, and she has been conducting qualitative studies of software development teams since the early 1990s. More recently, her focus has been on agile software development. She is also joint author of a leading textbook on Interaction Design, which includes coverage of ethnographic methods in software development. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of London.
Cleidson R. B. de Souza is an Associate Professor at Federal University of Pará, Brazil. His research interests are in the intersection between software engineering and computer-supported cooperative work. He has conducted ethnographic studies of software developers at large multi-national corporations and published his results at conferences like ICSE, FSE, CSCW, GROUP and ECSCW. He holds a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science and M.Sc. from University of California, Irvine, a M.Sc. in Computer Science from State University of Campinas, Brazil and a B.S. in Computer Science from the Federal University of Pará, Brazil.
Yvonne Dittrich works as an associate professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen. Her research interests are use-oriented design and development of software and software development as cooperative work. She has been involved in organizing several workshops on ‘Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering’ at the International Conference of Software Engineering. She is currently editing a special issue of the Journal for Computer Supported Cooperative Work on ‘Software Development as Cooperative Work’ together with Janice Singer, Toronto and Dave Randall, Manchester. She developed an empirical research approach Cooperative Method Development together with industrial partners which is based on problem oriented software process improvement as a learning cycle both for the industrial partner as well as for the researchers involved. In a recent project, she applied this approach to investigate the development, customization, and appropriation of software products.