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Navigating constraints: the design work of professional software developers

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports on initial results from a study of software developers doing their authentic work in their place of work. We apply the ethnographic and interaction-analytic methods that the CHI community has used to study people carrying out their work in non-software domains. Our preliminary results show professional software developers spending the majority of their time navigating a myriad of largely invisible constraints arising from multiple, concrete, real-world sources. They use frequent hypothesis-probe-interpret to cycles navigate the contextual, complex systems that they inhabit and construct. These constraints are qualitatively different from those reported in the literature based on early conceptual design.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2015)The "pair" as a problematic unit of analysis for pair programmingProceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.5555/2819321.2819332(64-70)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
  • (2015)The "Pair" as a Problematic Unit of Analysis for Pair ProgrammingProceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1109/CHASE.2015.16(64-70)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
  • (2014)Asking Research QuestionsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/264492414:3(1-8)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2014

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '13: CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2013
    3360 pages
    ISBN:9781450319522
    DOI:10.1145/2468356
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Publication History

    Published: 27 April 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. distributed cognition
    2. ethnography
    3. interaction analysis
    4. navigating constraints
    5. software design
    6. video analysis
    7. workplace analysis

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    CHI EA '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 630 of 1,963 submissions, 32%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2015)The "pair" as a problematic unit of analysis for pair programmingProceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.5555/2819321.2819332(64-70)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
    • (2015)The "Pair" as a Problematic Unit of Analysis for Pair ProgrammingProceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1109/CHASE.2015.16(64-70)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
    • (2014)Asking Research QuestionsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/264492414:3(1-8)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2014

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