Gaining an understanding of the state of an organisation’s culture during Agile transformation is important because culture underpins all aspects of an organisation’s way of working and can indicate how successful the transformation has been. This paper explores the impact of Agile transformation on various dimensions of organisational culture over time within a technology organisation. Additionally, it demonstrates how datasets collected using the Pulse survey instrument, a tool for assessing an organisation’s culture, can be analysed to provide actionable insights to support organisations in their cultural transformation efforts. This paper employs a mixed research method to conduct a post-hoc analysis of the datasets obtained from a technology organisation that utilised the survey instrument in 2021 and 2022 to assess its transformation agenda. The collected data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. We also assess the internal reliability and validity of the instrument using Cronbach’s Alpha, Composite Reliability, factor loadings and Average Variance Extracted. Results show that all the Alpha values of the instrument fall between 0.744 and 0.901, which are higher than the satisfactory value of 0.700, indicating acceptable to excellent reliability. After the intervention, the targeted cultural area, that is, Trust and Transparency (TT) improved significantly, and there was a general improvement across almost all areas. The organisation found the insights provided by the survey instrument aided their understanding of the change process. This study presents an analysis framework to support organisations using or seeking to use the Pulse survey instrument in their efforts to transform culture. The findings validate the use of statistical analysis and data-driven approaches to track shifts in various dimensions of organisational culture over time. The study concludes that targeted efforts on culture elements can lead to corresponding improvements in many areas including those not targeted, emphasising the interconnectedness of Agile culture elements.

Resilience engineering (RE) is most commonly applied at the organisational level, and has historically been associated with safety-critical industries such as nuclear, medical or aviation. This paper explores the application of RE frameworks within software engineering, and investigates resilient performance of the socio-technical system that supports the creation of software. We present a preliminary study based on a secondary analysis of data from previous ethnographic studies of commercial software practice. This analysis uses an RE framework devised for small team practice in safety critical settings. We present and discuss three salient episodes of software practice that illustrate the application of RE principles to software engineering, and suggest how this kind of analysis may benefit software engineering. We present challenges and opportunities based on our experience and propose future research directions.

Abstract Agile organizations have to deal regularly with change and at the same time adapt to sustain agility. In this paper, we present an initial study to identify factors considered when changes need to be made to sustain agility. We used a novel data collection approach, critical decision method (CDM), and investigated three theoretical lenses, paradox theory, situation awareness and shared mental models, to explore the kind of practical consequences they help to uncover. This paper presents the findings of this initial study together with reflections on the data collection method and the three theoretical lenses. Three key dimensions relevant to sustaining agility emerge from the use of these theoretical lenses: teams vs organization; understanding the environment vs the impact of change internally; and understanding “now” vs looking into the future.

The integration of Agile software development and User Experience (UX) has become a growing field of research, as both approaches play critical roles in building digital products and services. In this special issue on Agile UX, the current state of the field is explored through a combination of systematic literature reviews and qualitative and quantitative studies. The special issue provide an overview of the key trends, challenges, and successes in combining Agile and UX, and highlight the importance of involving stakeholders throughout development. The shift from plan-driven approaches to Agile UX approaches has brought a focus on human values and a better understanding of the importance of considering users’ needs. We present recent advances in research and practice, showing that Agile UX is a continuous journey towards changing user behavior by delivering value.

The pressure on software developers to produce secure software has never been greater. But what does security look like in environments that do not produce security-critical software? In answer to this question, this multi-sited ethnographic study characterizes security episodes and identifies five typical behaviors in software development. Using theory drawn from information security and motivation research in software engineering, this article characterizes key ways in which individual developers form security responses to meet the demands of particular circumstances, providing a framework managers and teams can use to recognize, understand, and alter security activity in their environments.

As of 2021, there were more than 170 guidelines on AI ethics and responsible, trustworthy AI in circulation according to the AI Ethics Guidelines Global Inventory maintained by AlgorithmWatch, an organisation which tracks the effects of increased digitalisation on everyday lives. However, from the perspective of day-to-day work, for those engaged in designing, developing, and maintaining AI systems identifying relevant guidelines and translating them into practice presents a challenge.

Abstract Project governance is an important activity in agile software development (ASD) projects for project success. Middle managers are part of the governance structure in ASD projects. Despite the efficacy of project governance and existence of middle managers in agile teams, project governance and middle management in ASD projects are under-researched. This multiple-case study investigates the roles of middle managers in agile project governance activities within two Nigerian ASD projects through the lens of activity theory. We collected data in semi-structured interviews, observations, questionnaires, and company documents. Our findings show that middle managers performed 25 roles related to planning and coordination for project alignment and execution, continuous improvement and organisational change, agile and technical leadership, monitoring, and capability building. We conclude that middle managers are pivotal to project governance practice and the effectual functioning of agile teams in ASD projects. The study will help agile practitioners to better understand the roles of middle managers in agile project governance. Results from this work contribute to the ‘middle management in agile’ debate and offer an alternative view that may change beliefs about middle managers in agile project settings.

Despite the availability of various methods and tools to facilitate secure coding, developers continue to write code that contains common vulnerabilities. It is important to understand why technological advances do not sufficiently facilitate developers in writing secure code. To widen our understanding of developers' behaviour, we considered the complexity of the security decision space of developers using theory from cognitive and social psychology. Our interdisciplinary study reported in this article (1) draws on the psychology literature to provide conceptual underpinnings for three categories of impediments to achieving security goals, (2) reports on an in-depth meta-analysis of existing software security literature that identified a catalogue of factors that influence developers' security decisions, and (3) characterises the landscape of existing security interventions that are available to the developer during coding and identifies gaps. Collectively, these show that different forms of impediments to achieving security goals arise from different contributing factors. Interventions will be more effective where they reflect psychological factors more sensitively and marry technical sophistication, psychological frameworks, and usability. Our analysis suggests “adaptive security interventions” as a solution that responds to the changing security needs of individual developers and a present a proof-of-concept tool to substantiate our suggestion.

This is a demonstration of how to use a deck of Concept Craft Cards that represent the first iteration of a toolkit for Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) developers. The cards will be available to share, discuss and deploy online in relation to a series of non-human client briefs. At the top conceptual level, we offer suggestions for ACI developers embarking on a new design journey; the next conceptual level considers user experience and offers our recommendations for interaction design that values cognitive and sensory enrichment; at a practical level, we provide a set of topic cards, to be used during development to support the realization of design concepts through crafting and tinkering.

Species-specific aesthetics is an important consideration for interaction designers working with animals. The paper explores the concept of species-specific aesthetics with particular reference to elephants. Applying existing aesthetic dimensions and design principles to the challenge of designing interactive enrichment for them, we show how the insights gained can inform more than human-centered design in different settings. We offer a multi-faceted, multi-sensory lens for examining an animal-centred aesthetic experience of technology.

Although a stable team is deemed optimal for agile project success, new team members need to join ongoing agile projects. Newcomers must rapidly assimilate into the organisational and project environment while learning how to contribute effectively to the project and integrate into the team without seriously interrupting project progress. This paper addresses how newcomers integrate into an established agile project team and the challenges newcomers and the team face during this process. This paper is a single case study of a co-located agile project team in a large IT department who regularly onboard inexperienced newcomers. We found a mixture of traditional onboarding practices and specific agile practices contribute to the onboarding process. Onboarding challenges include empowerment and mindset change, accommodating part-timers, conveying agile principles, and adjusting to changes in team composition.

The ever increasing complexity of software and rapidly changing development environments continues to drive the evolution of new technologies, techniques, and tools. This special issue, Software Engineering in Practice, provides the software engineering community with a valuable collection of current high-quality research articles that explore topics driven by real problems in industry. The inspiration for this special issue has drawn upon the ICSE Software Engineering in Practice Track (ICSE SEIP 2019)1, part of the Industry Program at the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering2; it builds upon the success of the previous special issue with the same theme.1 The ICSE SEIP Track provides a premier venue for researchers and practitioners to discuss innovations and solutions to concrete software engineering problems. The guest coeditor team for this special issue is an international collaboration involving the co-organizers of the ICSE SEIP 2019 Track, Helen Sharp and Michael Whalen, and two editors of the Journal of Software: Practice and Experience3 (JSPE), Judith Bishop and Kendra M. L. Cooper. The Call for Papers was designed to encourage submissions that presented novel and innovative ideas that broadly spanned the software engineering discipline; ideas that provided rigorously validated solutions for real problems encountered by practitioners. In order to promote an inclusive environment, the call was broadly disseminated as an open call; it was advertised on the JSPE and the ICSE SEIP 2019 websites, established software engineering newsgroups (eg, SEWORLD) and conference announcement sites (eg, WikiCFP), in addition to numerous professional and social media platforms. The call required submissions be original manuscripts that had not been previously published and were also not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submissions of research article, survey papers, short communication, and extended conference papers were welcome; extended conference papers were required to include at least 30% additional novel contributions. The response from the software engineering community was enthusiastic: the special issue received 25 manuscripts submitted by authors from 13 countries. Submissions featured international collaborations from researchers in academia and industry, cases studies from industry, and the use of open source data sets and systems provided by the broader community. The submissions were reviewed according to the JSPE standards, with a goal of publishing the online version of the articles in a timely fashion. Ultimately, six articles were selected for the special issue. Overviews of these accepted manuscripts are presented below, organized into two groups. Novel contributions in the area of intelligent code analysis are explored in several of the papers in the special issue. Kim et al present an automated code analysis approach based on machine learning to recommend an appropriate level for logging runtime events. Rong et al present an automated code analysis approach based on templates and rules to generate documentation in a timely manner within agile DevOps environments. In addition, Huang et al present an automated code analysis approach to identify the need for header comments with the goal of supporting the long-term evolution of the product. Several of the papers in the special issue are related to the broader topic of reuse, from different perspectives. Weir et al present an on-going lightweight security training program that has the potential to be reused by a wide range of development teams; the research has a grounded theory foundation. Koziolek et al present a reference architecture to further the standardization and automation of IoT integration. Hu et al present a data mining-based approach to search and filter existing code samples with the goal of establishing high quality software repositories. We would like to extend our warmest thanks to all the authors who submitted their manuscripts, the anonymous reviewers who provided timely, high-quality review comments in their generous service to the community, and the JSPE editorial board and personnel.

Context: The proper management of people can help software organisations to achieve higher levels of success. However, the limited attention paid to the appropriate use of theories to underpin the research in this area leaves it unclear how to deal with human aspects of software engineers, such as motivation and satisfaction. Objectives: This article aims to expose what drives the motivation and satisfaction of software engineers at work. Methods: A multiple case study was conducted at four software organisations in Brazil. For 11 months, data was collected using semi-structured interviews, diary studies, and document analyses. Results: The Theory of Motivation and Satisfaction of Software Engineers (TMS-SE), presented in this article, combines elements from well established theories with new findings, and translates them into the software engineering context. Conclusion: The TMS-SE advances the understanding of people management in the software engineering field and presents a strong conceptual framework for future investigations in this area.

Abstract Austerity and financial constraints have been threatening the public sector in the UK for a number of years. Foreseeing the threat of continued budget cuts, and addressing the situation many local councils face, requires internal transformations for financial stability without losing the key focus on public service. Agile transformations have been undertaken by organisations wanting to learn from the software development community and bringing agile principles into the wider organisation. This paper describes and analyses an ongoing behaviour-led transformation in a district council in the UK. It presents the results of the analysis of 19 interviews with internal stakeholders at the council, of observations of meetings among senior and middle management in a five-month period. The paper explores the successes and the challenges encountered towards the end of the transformation process and reflects on balancing acts to address the challenges, between: disruption and business as usual, empowerment and goal setting, autonomy and processes and procedures, and behaviours and skills. Based on our findings, we suggest that behaviours on their own cannot guarantee a sustained agile culture, and that this is equally important for enterprise agility and for large-scale agile software development transformations.

The communication of requirements within software development is vital for project success. Requirements engineering and testing are two processes that when aligned can enable the discovery of issues and misunderstandings earlier, rather than later, and avoid costly and time-consuming rework and delays. There are a number of practices that support requirements-test alignment. However, each organisation and project is different and there is no one-fits-all set of practices. The software process improvement method called Gap Finder is designed to increase requirements-test alignment. The method contains two parts: an assessment part and a prescriptive part. It detects potential communication gaps between people and between artefacts (the assessment part), and identifies practices for mitigating these gaps (the prescriptive part). This paper presents the design and formative evaluation of the prescriptive part; an evaluation of the assessment part was published previously. The Gap Finder method was constructed using a design science research approach and is built on the Theory of Distances for Software Engineering, which in turn is grounded in empirical evidence from five case companies. The formative evaluation was performed through a case study in which Gap Finder was applied to an on-going development project. A qualitative and mixed-method approach was taken in the evaluation, including ethnographically-informed observations. The results show that Gap Finder can detect relevant communication gaps and seven of the nine prescribed practices were deemed practically relevant for mitigating these gaps. The project team found the method to be useful and supported joint reflection and improvement of their requirements communication. Our findings demonstrate that an empirically-based theory can be used to improve software development practices and provide a foundation for further research on factors that affect requirements communication.

Agile approaches are adopted in industry to improve outcomes from software development, and are increasingly the subject of research studies. However, adoption is not the end of the story. Agile requires on-going change and commitment in order to become sustainable and embedded within teams and organisations. This study explores current perceptions of post-adoptive agility. We asked 50 practitioners 'what does agile sustainability mean to you?'. Analysis of practitioner comments identified four themes: being completely agile, independent, focused on business value and need, and consistent across time. Post-adoptive agile is an under-researched area, there is inconsistent use of terminology, and there is a gap between practitioners' and researchers' perceptions about what is important for sustaining agile.

Knowledge is a core resource for agile organisations that is transformed into products and services during the development process. Sharing of knowledge is essential across any organisation, and it has been claimed that the software industry requires more knowledge management than any other sector. Agile methodologies concentrate on team level collaboration, and some techniques for inter-team knowledge sharing have also proved to be successful. But these techniques focus on within-team and between-team knowledge sharing rather than knowledge sharing across the organisation. This paper presents the results of a survey with 81 responses on organisational knowledge sharing in a multinational agile company. The survey focuses on three aspects of knowledge sharing: within agile teams, beyond the team with company colleagues, and with customers. It concentrates on knowledge sharing practices, ease of knowledge sharing and motivation for knowledge sharing. Summary statistics, regression, and test of equity are used as analysis techniques. Results show that knowledge sharing with team members is significantly easier than with customers or company colleagues beyond their team. In addition, using agile practices improves ease of knowledge sharing within teams but not with customers or colleagues. Extrinsic motivators need to be in place to encourage knowledge sharing across the organisation, especially where such knowledge sharing is not an automatic consequence of completing the work.

Background: Most companies practicing Agile are not fully Agile but instead they combine both Agile and traditional practices in their operations. It is not clear how these practices can be successfully used together in an organisation. Aims: We investigate practitioners' mitigation strategies related to the challenge of doing Agile in a non-Agile environment. Method: Strategies were collected during two studies, an online survey and an interactive workshop run at an Agile meetup and analysed thematically. Results: Strategies related to the wider organisation and not just software development. Two perspectives emerged from the data: an organisational and a change perspective. Five organisational themes were identified with Management and decision-making and Culture the two biggest themes. Nine change themes were identified, with Being open, Using specific approaches and Educating the biggest themes. Conclusions: Better understanding is needed of how Agile practitioners can accomplish bottom-up change in their organisation.

Ethnography is a qualitative research method used to study people and cultures. It is largely adopted in disciplines outside software engineering, including different areas of computer science. Ethnography can provide an in-depth understanding of the socio-technological realities surrounding everyday software development practice, i.e., it can help to uncover not only what practitioners do, but also why they do it. Despite its potential, ethnography has not been widely adopted by empirical software engineering researchers, and receives little attention in the related literature. The main goal of this paper is to explain how empirical software engineering researchers would benefit from adopting ethnography. This is achieved by explicating four roles that ethnography can play in furthering the goals of empirical software engineering: to strengthen investigations into the social and human aspects of software engineering; to inform the design of software engineering tools; to improve method and process development; and to inform research programmes. This article introduces ethnography, explains its origin, context, strengths and weaknesses, and presents a set of dimensions that position ethnography as a useful and usable approach to empirical software engineering research. Throughout the paper, relevant examples of ethnographic studies of software practice are used to illustrate the points being made.

Context -- Motivation and job satisfaction are not the same thing, and although business organization research recognized this a long time ago, in Software Engineering research, we have not. As a result, thirty years of research on motivation in software engineering has produced knowledge on what makes software engineers generally happier, but not about how to increase their motivation. Goal -- In this article, we aim to identify visible signs of a software engineer who is motivated to work. Method -- We describe a field study in which 62 practitioners in Brazil reported their view of "motivation" in the context of their practical work. Data was collected by means of audio-recorded semi-structured interviews, and a thematic analysis was applied to identify the most relevant descriptors of motivation. Results -- Our data reveal that (1) motivated Software Engineers are engaged, focused, and collaborative; and (2) the term "motivation" is used as an umbrella term to cover several distinct organizational behaviours that are not necessarily related to the individual's desire to work. Conclusions -- Without a clear picture of the difference between these two concepts, work-based motivation programs may not be designed effectively to address either turnover or performance issues. Overall, this work indicates the need for a more effective conceptual system to investigate and encourage both job satisfaction and work motivation in software engineering research and practice.

Software is created by people for people working in a range of environments and under various conditions. Understanding the cooperative and human aspects of software development is crucial in order to comprehend how methods and tools are used, and thereby improve the creation and maintenance of software. Both researchers and practitioners have recognized the need to investigate these aspects, but the results of such investigations are dispersed in different conferences and communities. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussing high quality research on human and cooperative aspects of software engineering. We aim to provide both a meeting place for the community and the possibility for researchers interested in joining the field to present and discuss their work in progress and to get an overview over the field.

INVocD is a database of the identifier name declarations and vocabulary found in 60 FLOSS Java projects where the source code structure is recorded and the identifier name vocabulary is made directly available, offering advantages for identifier name research over conventional source code models. The database has been used to support a range of research projects from identifier name analysis to concept location, and provides many opportunities to researchers. INVocD may be downloaded from http://oro.open.ac.uk/36992.

Ethnography is a powerful qualitative empirical approach which can be used to understand and hence improve work practice. Ethnographically-informed methods are widely adopted in the Social Sciences but are not so popular with software engineering researchers. As with many inter-disciplinary approaches, ethnographic methods can be misunderstood and misapplied, leading to results being dismissed with a “so what?” response. Drawing on my own and other's experience of applying this approach in empirical studies of software practice, I will provide an overview of the role of ethnography in Software Engineering research. I will describe 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 understand developers' work practices, to inform the development of new processes, methods and tools, and to evaluate and evolve existing practices.

Innovative tools and teaching practices often fail to be adopted by educators in the field, despite evidence of their effectiveness. Naïve models of educational change assume this lack of adoption arises from failure to properly disseminate promising work, but evidence suggests that dissemination via publication is simply not effective. Instead of studying the adoption or rejection of a particular intervention, this paper turns the problem around. We asked educators to describe changes they had made to their teaching practice and analyzed the resulting stories to learn more about: the kinds of changes being made, their motivations for changing their practice, and the means by which they learned of pedagogical innovations. Of the 99 change stories analyzed, only three demonstrate an active search for new practices or materials on the part of teachers, and published materials were consulted in just eight of the stories. Most of the changes occurred locally, without input from outside sources, or involved only personal interaction with other educators. These results have important implications for educational developers, or researchers wishing to propagate information about new teaching materials or techniques.

Pair Programming (PP) requires close collaboration and mutual engagement. Most existing empirical studies of PP do not focus on developers' behaviour during PP sessions, and focus instead on the effects of PP such as productivity. However, disengagement, where a developer is not focusing on solving the task or understanding the problem and allows their partner to work by themselves, can hinder collaboration between developers and have a negative effect on their performance. This paper reports on an empirical study that investigates disengagement. Twenty-one industrial pair programming sessions were video and audio recorded and qualitatively analysed to investigate circumstances that lead to disengagement. We identified five reasons for disengagement: interruptions during the collaboration, the way the work is divided, the simplicity of the task involved, social pressure on inexperienced pair programmers, and time pressure. Our findings suggest that disengagement is sometimes acceptable and agreed upon between the developers in order to speed up problem solving. However, we also found episodes of disengagement where developers “drop out” of their PP sessions and are not able to follow their partner's work nor contribute to the task at hand, thus losing the expected benefits of pairing. Analysis of sessions conducted under similar circumstances but where mutual engagement was sustained identified three behaviours that help to maintain engagement: encouraging the novice to drive, verbalisation and feedback, and asking for clarification.

Recent research suggests that the motivating factors in software engineering are evolving and that our current understanding of motivation in software engineering might be out of date. This paper presents an analysis of semi-structured interviews with 13 professional software engineers. The data suggests that 'the work' continues to be enjoyable and that 'people' are important, but that 'obstacles' really sap the energy of software engineers.

Software is created by people for people working in varied environments, under various conditions. Thus understanding cooperative and human aspects of software development is crucial to comprehend how methods and tools are used, and thereby improve the creation and maintenance of software. Over the years, both researchers and practitioners have recognized the need to study and understand these aspects. Despite recognizing this, researchers in cooperative and human aspects have no clear place to meet and are dispersed in different research conferences and areas. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussing high quality research on human and cooperative aspects of software engineering. We aim at providing both a meeting place for the growing community and the possibility for researchers interested in joining the field to present their work in progress and get an overview over the field.

Class names represent the concepts implemented in object-oriented source code and are key elements in program comprehension and, thus, software maintenance. Programming conventions often state that class names should be noun-phrases, but there is little further guidance for developers on the composition of class names. Other researchers have observed that the majority of Java class identifier names are composed of one or more nouns preceded, optionally, by one or more adjectives. However, no detailed analysis of class identifier name structure has been undertaken that could be leveraged to support program comprehension activities. We investigate the lexical and syntactic composition of Java class identifier names in two ways. Firstly, as others have done for C function and Java method names, we identify conventional patterns found in the use of parts of speech. Secondly, we identify the origin of words used in class names within the name of any super class and implemented interfaces to identify patterns of class name construction related to inheritance. Through the analysis of 120,000 unique class names found in 60 open source projects we identify both common and project specific class naming conventions. We apply this knowledge in a case study of the mind-mapping tool Freemind to investigate whether class names that follow unconventional naming schemes are candidates for refactoring either a name refactoring that conforms to established naming conventions within the code base, or refactoring of the class that results in conventionally named classes.

Abstract Previous discussions of how User Experience (UX) designers and Agile developers can work together have focused on bringing the disciplines together by merging their processes or adopting specific techniques. This paper reports in detail on one observational study of a mature Scrum team in a large organization, and their interactions with the UX designers working on the same project. The evidence from our study shows that Agile development and UX design practice is not explained by rationalized accounts dealing with processes or techniques. Instead, understanding practice requires examining the wider organizational setting in which the Agile developers and UX designers are embedded. Our account focuses on the situatedness of the work by making reference to values and assumptions in the organizational setting, and the consequences that those values and assumptions had for practice. In this organizational setting, cooperation between the Agile developers and UX designers was achieved through ongoing articulation work by the developers, who were compelled to engage a culturally distinct UX design division. Based on this study, insights into culture, self‐organization and purposeful work highlight significant implications for practice. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software practitioner motivation has been recognised as a key factor in system quality, yet much of what we know about practitioner motivation is based on research conducted decades ago. In this paper, we present the analysis of data collected from 23 current practitioners at a workshop on motivation. This is the third in a series of workshops, each aimed at investigating the motivational factors in current software practice. We found that people factors are those most often cited, which reinforces the findings from the two previous workshops. This has implications for motivational programmes in software organisations, and indicates the need for further empirical research in the area.

Software is created by people---software engineers---working in varied environments, under various conditions. Thus understanding cooperative and human aspect of software development is crucial to comprehend how methods and tools are used, and thereby improving the creation and maintenance of software. Inspired by the hosting country's concept of co-responsibility -- ubuntu -- we especially invited contributions that address community-based development like open source development and sustainability of ICT eco-systems.

This tutorial provides 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 begins 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 then describes 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, some practical issues concerning the selection and use of ethnographic methods by software engineers are discussed. Throughout the tutorial, examples from the presenters' experience illustrate the points made.

On the basis of an analysis of contemporaneous materials, we present a history of object-oriented technology from the late 1970s, when object orientation was little known, until the early 1990s, when object-oriented technology was widely accepted across computer science. We identify three phases of emergence: interpretative flexibility; community and dissemination; and pervasiveness. We describe the role of various communities, constituencies, fora and programming languages, and show how the intellectual history of an idea underpinning a technology differs from that technology's path of adoption.

Agile software development promotes feedback, discipline and close collaboration between all members of the development team, and de-emphasises documentation, ‘big design up front’ and hierarchical processes. Agile teams tend to be co-located and multi-disciplinary, and rely heavily on face-to-face communication and seemingly simple physical artefacts to support interaction. In this paper we focus on the functionality of two key physical artefacts – the story card and the Wall – which, individually and in combination, underpin the team’s activity. These artefacts have two main roles – one which enables a shared understanding of requirements and one which facilitates the development process itself. We consider these roles from two perspectives: a notational perspective and a social perspective. This discussion shows how the two perspectives – the notational and the social – intertwine and are mutually supportive. Any attempt to replace these physical artefacts with alternative support for an agile team needs to take account of both perspectives, and the complex relationships between them.

Motivated software engineers make a critical contribution to delivering successful software systems. Understanding the motivations of software engineers and the impact of motivation on software engineering outcomes could significantly affect the industry's ability to deliver good quality software systems. Understanding the motivations of people generally in relation to their work is underpinned by eight classic motivation theories from the social sciences. We would expect these classic motivation theories to play an important role in developing a rigorous understanding of the specific motivations of software engineers. In this article we investigate how this theoretical basis has been exploited in previous studies of software engineering. We analyzed 92 studies of motivation in software engineering that were published in the literature between 1980 and 2006. Our main findings are that many studies of software engineers' motivations are not explicitly underpinned by reference to the classic motivation theories. Furthermore, the findings presented in these studies are often not explicitly interpreted in terms of those theories, despite the fact that in many cases there is a relationship between those findings and the theories. Our conclusion is that although there has been a great deal of previous work looking at motivation in software engineering, the lack of reference to classic theories of motivation means that the current body of work in the area is weakened and our understanding of motivation in software engineering is not as rigorous as it may at first appear. This weakness in the current state of knowledge highlights important areas for future researchers to contribute towards developing a rigorous and usable body of knowledge in motivating software engineers.

We have analyzed evolution patterns over two and a half years for a system developed using extreme programming. We find that the system shows a smooth pattern of growth overall, that (McCabe) code complexity is low, and that the relative amount of complexity control work (e.g. refactoring) is higher than in other systems we have studied. To interpret these results, we have drawn on qualitative data including the results of an observational study, records of progress and productivity, and comments on our findings from team members.

In this paper, we describe our investigation of the motivational differences between project managers and developers. Motivation has been found to be a central factor in successful software projects. However the motivation of software engineers is generally poorly understood and previous work done in the area is thought to be largely out-of-date. We present data collected from 6 software developers and 4 project managers at a workshop we organized at the XP2006 international conference.

This article describes an investigation of the way usefulness of an information system is shaped by sociocultural factors in a work context. It presents technological frames as a conceptual tool that helps to understand usefulness from this point of view. It suggests that developers and users shape their experience of the usefulness of a system through these technological frames. This is illustrated with a qualitative study, in which developers' expectations of the usefulness of an enterprise resource planning system differed from those of users, who experienced the usefulness of the same system in diverse ways. Technological frames are proposed as an analysis framework for assessing how context and local culture shape the utility and usability of systems in situ, that is, once they are deployed to their actual contexts of use.

The Open University's M880 Software Engineering is a postgraduate distance education course aimed at software professionals. The case study element of the course (approximately 100 hours of study) is presented through an innovative interactive multimedia simulation of a software house Open Software Solutions (OSS). The student 'joins' OSS as an employee and performs various tasks as a member of the company's project teams. The course is now in its sixth presentation and has been studied by over 1500 students. In this paper, we present the background to the development, and a description of the environment and student tasks.

We are designing a computer-based multi-media learning environment based on an imaginary software house to suppor~ professional postgraduate students studying a course on software development.The environment is intended to provide students with a realistic context for the practical application of techniques taught in the course, and a range of project work which will stimulate learning needs which are relevant to the course's learning objectives.Students will be expected to spend 120 study hours in connection with this environment.This paper describes the course and the environment and raises design issues we have encountered.