AN APPROACH FOR IMPROVING THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS BY USING A GAME THEORETIC PERSPECTIVE - Towards a Theory of Social Productivity of Software Development Teams

Abstract

Abstract:As software development is considered a form of knowledge based social activity, investigating social interactions and behaviors of individuals and teams constitutes a starting point for improving organizational performance and productivity. Therefore, a software development organization is regarded as a form of social network, which may be more efficiently structured based upon participants' skills, roles and capacities to exchange information. This paper aims to propose a research framework for modeling development activities in terms of social interrelationships. It investigates ways for improving the productivity of the software development process to several social issues (e.g. team formations, interpersonal conflicts, social loafing) that affect the group setting during the software development process. An industrial survey will be conducted to validate the proposed framework. This survey will be applied to three medium size software organizations; (i) to measure social aspects of productivity, (ii) to assess the effectiveness of our approach, (iii) and to improve the welfare of the software development organization. Semi-structured interviews with practitioners, and expert reviews with the managers will be used to evaluate the results. Ultimately, based on the principles of our game theoretical approach and collected data, we propose a research framework, which will benefit future research by drawing a road map that establishes a body of knowledge, specifically on software development teams and organizations.

The Development and Progress of Engineering Economics: A Retrospect and Prospect Based on Visual Analysis

“…Among all those publications analyzed above, the frequency of research related to software engineering is high, especially in the last ten years. The topics include but are not limited to technical debt management (Ramasubbu & Kemerer, 2019), social aspects of development process (Yilmaz & O'Connor, 2011), the return on a softwareevolution investment (Tansey & Stroulia, 2010), quality management (Ramasubbu & Kemerer, 2019), cloud computing (Fokaefs et al, 2017;Si et al, 2023), and fault prediction (Kumar & Sureka, 2017). Tools and theories such as empirical study (Cruz et al, 2019;, machine learning models (Kumar & Sureka, 2017;Sonabend et al, 2021), game theory (Chen & Larbani, 2006;Adler et al, 2021) have been applied to explore and solve different projects or practical issues.…”

“…They make the management and optimization of various projects more intelligent and precise, which helps to better ensure the achievement of economic and quality objectives. In addition, it is well recognized that software development can be seen as a form of social activity based on knowledge, which reminds us to value social interactions and behaviors of individuals and teams that contribute to organizational performance and productivity improvement (Yilmaz & O'Connor, 2011). Thus, theoretical and practical research around software engineering has the potential to be a powerful driver of progress and transformation in the field of EE.…”