Software engineering research and practice are hampered by the lack of a well-understood, top-level dependent variable. Recent initiatives on General Theory of Software Engineering suggest a multifaceted variable -Software Engineering Success. However, its exact dimensions are unknown. This paper investigates the dimensions (not causes) of software engineering success. An interdisciplinary sample of 191 design professionals (68 in the software industry) were interviewed concerning their perceptions of success. Non-software designers (e.g. architects) were included to increase the breadth of ideas and facilitate comparative analysis. Transcripts were subjected to supervised, semiautomated semantic content analysis, including a software developer vs. other professionals comparison. Findings suggest that participants view their work as time-constrained projects with explicit clients and other stakeholders. Success depends on stakeholder impacts -financial, social, physical and emotionaland is understood through feedback. Concern with meeting explicit requirements is peculiar to software engineering and design is not equated with aesthetics in many other fields. Software engineering success is a complex multifaceted variable, which cannot sufficiently be explained by traditional dimensions including user satisfaction, profitability or meeting requirements, budgets and schedules. A proto-theory of success is proposed, which models success as the net impact on a particular stakeholder at a particular time. Stakeholder impacts are driven by project efficiency, artifact quality and market performance. Success is not additive, e.g., 'low' success for clients does not average with 'high' success for developers to make 'moderate' success overall; rather, a project may be simultaneously successful and unsuccessful from different perspectives.

This paper focuses on the institutionalization of inequality in relations between donors and NGOs in the international development sector. We argue that these relations operate within a neoliberal and competitive marketplace, which are necessarily unequal. Specifically, we focus on the apparently mundane practice of impact assessment, and consider how this is fundamental to understanding the performative enactment of institutional inequality. For our analysis we draw upon Miller and Rose’s work on governmentality and calculative practices. We develop our argument with reference to a case study of a donor driven impact assessment initiative being conducted in India. Specifically, we consider an impact assessment initiative that the donor has piloted with one of the NGOs they fund that seeks to improve the livelihoods of Indian farmers. We will argue that institutional inequality can be understood in the way the market as a social institution becomes enacted into mundane calculative practices. Calculative practices produce different kinds of knowledge and in so doing becomes a way in which subjects position themselves, or become positioned, as unequal.

International development is now a data-, information-, and knowledge-intensive industry, which some have characterised as "development 2.0." Power relations are rarely foregrounded in this landscape, even though they shape what data and knowledge is constructed or discarded. Impact evaluation is one example of this intensive work, yet evaluation models seldom make power relations explicit or actionable. Furthermore, implicit models of data and knowledge on which impact evaluation processes rely also neglect power and social practice.The resulting problem is that power remains silent in development impact evaluation practice. In response, this article articulates an alternative, using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to analyse impact evaluation activities conducted by a UK-based philanthropic donor and their grantee in India, a small non-government organisation (NGO) doing rural development work. The analysis uses CHAT to illustrate how impact data, knowledge, and power are simultaneously generated during professional evaluation activities. The study broadens our view of impact and offers two contributions. Firstly, for researchers in information and communications technology for development (ICT4D) and knowledge management for development (KM4D), it contributes the application of a perspective on social practice, CHAT, to development evaluation. A novel extension to CHAT, the concept of "temporal activity chains," is put forward to complement the established activity system frame. Secondly, the article demonstrates a practice-based view of development impact evaluation for researchers and practitioners who wish to acknowledge and respond to the generation of unequal power dynamics during evaluation processes. KEYWORDScultural historical activity theory (CHAT), data, knowledge, power, international development, impact evaluationThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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