Analysing Communication in the Context of a Software Production Organisation

While quality has been widely stressed in literature as a goal of the software design methodologies, quality as a result of the interaction among the actors involved in the design and development processes has not received the same attention. This work aims to investigate the software production process by addressing the communication among work groups in the organisation. Our focus is on understanding the communication process that takes place among the groups, considering that the computational artefact emerges as a result of the communicational acts issued between people with different roles in the process. We base our understanding of communication in semiotic foundations, to propose a framework for analysing communication in the whole process of system design and development. The design process of a real organisation that produces commercial software illustrates our main ideas.