Speaker: Ohad Barzilay

Title: Activity Based Approach to Software Development

Abstract:

We describe an on going empirical software engineering field research done in 
the qualitative research methodology. We investigate industrial software 
development activities and patterns by watching professional programmers in 
major software companies at work, aiming to identify development activities 
which are currently assimilated in the coding phase. We use various methods 
of data gathering including: observations, interviews, reflective 
practitioner techniques and questionnaires. The research is built bottom-up: 
we start from fine-granulated activities observed in the field. We analyze 
the data using standard qualitative techniques and look for recurring 
activities and hidden patterns. Then, we refine our research questions and 
repeat the process (observation-analysis-refinement) aiming to build a field 
grounded theory. The first phase of this research was already completed 
earlier this year (2008) and involved investigating software development at 
the development sites of two major, worldwide software companies. 


In the talk we describe 2 software activities deduced from our observations 
that would focus our attention in later phases of the research: "example 
driven development" and "search centric development". Each of these software 
activities has great great affect on the way we build software today 
including the development process, programming practices, the professional 
training, building and using software development tools and others.