Toward Understanding Work Characteristics in Software Engineering
Cleyton V. C. de Magalhães · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2017
Context: Work Design refers to how work is conceived, assigned across organizational levels, and structured into tasks performed by individuals or teams. Recent studies have argued that work characteristics need further investigation to improve our understanding of how to design work and tasks in this software engineering practice. Goal: The aim of this research is to explore work characteristics in software engineering research and to investigate the relationship between these characteristics and work outcomes. We expect that these results can lead us toward a proposal of an instrument for measuring work characteristics in software engineering and the understanding of how to use such measures to improve software development practice. Method: The methodological strategy to conduct this research includes a non-exact replication of two surveys performed in other fields. Further, we plan to execute the same survey, enlarging the sample and enhancing the procedures. We also intend to perform a qualitative research with a sample of the participants of the previous survey. Current status: This thesis proposal is in early stage of development. We divided this study in three phases: First, we carried out a non-exact replication of two surveys performed in other areas. Professionals of Brazilian software organizations composed our sample and this phase aimed to identify the work characteristics of software development and assess the potential relationships of these characteristics with work outcomes. The second step of this study aims to enlarge our sample by including international software professionals. We also intend to enhance the variability of software development roles of the professionals in our sample. Finally, we will perform qualitative research, which aims to triangulate data collected in the previous phases and deepen our understanding about work characteristics in software engineering