Social Dependencies and Contrasts in Software Engineering Practice

This paper reports initial observations from a qualitative study of software engineering at a large technology company. Data were collected from interviews with software engineers and managers, formal company documents, and observations of group and team meetings. This is an early assessment of analytical categories we believe are important for understanding informal work processes and flow in a distributed software engineering team. These categories include the distributed nature of the organization; ownership and dependencies between code modules; and process improvement initiatives. Findings suggest that software engineers think about module dependencies as people dependencies; and reveal contradictions between the motivations of diverse and often concurrent process improvement efforts.