Navigating constraints: the design work of professional software developers

Authors:
David Socha;Josh Tenenberg
Affiliations:
University of Washington, Bothell, Bothell, Washington, USA;University of Washington, Tacoma, Tacoma, Washington, USA
Venue:
CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2013

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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.