Human Factors in Software Development

Abstract

Since the 1950s, psychologists have studied the behavioral aspects of computer programming. However, it has been difficult to integrate their data with theory because of the mixture of psychological paradigms that have guided their research. This article reviews the research results that have been generated under the fives psychological paradigms used most often in exploring programming problems. These five paradigms are ( 1 ) individual differences, ( 2 ) group behavior, ( 3 ) organizational behavior, ( 4 ) human factors, and ( 5 ) cognitive science. The major theoretical and practical contributions of each area to the theory and practice of software engineering are discussed. Current trends indicate that research guided by the paradigm of cognitive science will be the easiest to integrate with new developments in artificial intelligence and computer science theory.

Communication networks in geographically distributed software development

“…In The results from table 1 suggest that over time, developers become more productive in terms of changes submitted as the statistically significant and positive coefficient on the variable Time indicates. Consistent with prior research [12,13], higher levels of Domain Experience increased the number of changes submitted by the developers on a monthly basis. We also examined the impact of programming experience but the measure was highly correlated to domain experience and had similar impact to the one reported for domain experience.…”

“…The concept of performance could be interpreted across different dimensions such as the amount of code produced, the quality of that produced code in terms of lack of defects, efficiency and maintainability. Previous research has proposed different approaches to measure individual-level software development performance and, in this study, we focused on measures based on the amount of code created (see, e.g., Curtis [12]). We used two measures of performance.…”

Coordination Breakdowns and Their Impact on Development Productivity and Software Failures

“…An experienced software engineer familiar with tools and programming languages can be substantially more productive than an inexperienced developer (Brooks, 1995;Curtis, 1981;Curtis et al, 1988). Furthermore, experience with the domain area and the technical characteristics of the application being developed help accelerate development time (Curtis et al, 1988).…”

Competence gaps in software personnel: A multi-organizational study

“…Individual differences have been identified as one of the para digms for research analyzing human factors in software develop ment (Curtis, 2002). These individual differences could rely, among other factors, on competences (Sharp, Baddoo, Beecham, Tracy, & Robinson, 2009;Turley & Bieman, 1995).…”