Making Methods Work in Software Engineering Method Deployment - as a Social Achievement

Organisational problems in industry have evoked increased interest in empirical methodologies in the broader software engineering community. In particular, the human role in software development has been addressed. Qualitative research approaches are identified as necessary for understanding human nature. The qualitative approach addressed in this article is that of ethnography in relation to software engineering. Ethnography emphasises the members' point of view in order to understand the organisation of a social, cultural and technical setting. Today, with very few exceptions, it is sociologists who have performed the majority of ethnographic studies of software development -but how useful are these studies to software engineers? Ethnographic studies present problems from the observer's point of view. One implication of presenting studies from an ‘inside’ perspective is that they lend themselves to being regarded as revealing ‘bad methods’, i.e. which do not work in complex work situations. Taking from a software engineering point of view it is just as easy to point to the opposite interpretation of ‘bad practice’, i.e. a bad application of existing methods. The objective of this paper is to promote ‘ethnographic knowledge’ by revealing the different implicit research attitudes of ethnographers and software engineers, and to point to possibilities which combine studies that contribute an ‘inside perspective’ on software method improvement.