The who, what, how of software engineering research: a socio-technical framework
Software engineering is a socio-technical endeavor, and while many of our contributions focus on technical aspects, human stakeholders such as software developers are directly affected by and can benefit from our research and tool innovations. In this paper, we question how much of our research addr...
Saved in:
Published in | Empirical software engineering : an international journal Vol. 25; no. 5; pp. 4097 - 4129 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
New York
Springer US
01.09.2020
Springer Nature B.V |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | Software engineering is a socio-technical endeavor, and while many of our contributions focus on technical aspects, human stakeholders such as software developers are directly affected by and can benefit from our research and tool innovations. In this paper, we question how much of our research addresses human and social issues, and explore how much we study human and social aspects in our research designs. To answer these questions, we developed a socio-technical research framework to capture the main beneficiary of a research study (the
who
), the main type of research contribution produced (the
what
), and the research strategies used in the study (
how
we methodologically approach delivering relevant results given the
who
and
what
of our studies). We used this Who-What-How framework to analyze 151 papers from two well-cited publishing venues—the main technical track at the International Conference on Software Engineering, and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal by Springer—to assess how much this published research explicitly considers human aspects. We find that although a majority of these papers claim the contained research should benefit human stakeholders, most focus predominantly on technical contributions. Although our analysis is scoped to two venues, our results suggest a need for more diversification and triangulation of research strategies. In particular, there is a need for strategies that aim at a deeper understanding of human and social aspects of software development practice to balance the design and evaluation of technical innovations. We recommend that the framework should be used in the design of future studies in order to steer software engineering research towards explicitly including human and social concerns in their designs, and to improve the relevance of our research for human stakeholders. |
---|---|
ISSN: | 1382-3256 1573-7616 |
DOI: | 10.1007/s10664-020-09858-z |