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In this paper we discuss how programmers maintain and develop code as part of a large code base. We discuss instances of how programmers reason about interdependencies in code, how programmers decide the location of the particular code to be changed in improving software functionality, and how programmers reason about what code can form the basis for a new piece of code. All three examples are of occasions where programmers, for one reason or another, have discussed with other programmers the issues to do with their code. Such talk makes reasoning, which might otherwise be done privately ‘in the programmers head’, observable. Through our analysis of the examples of observed reasoning we wish to draw attention to how knowledge is produced, exhibited, demonstrated and deployed in maintaining and developing the code base.

During participatory development different professional groups with different professional languages meet. They have to communicate about the future software in a profound way. To enable that, a common way to talk about the future software has to be developed, relating concepts of the use context and concepts of software development. An example of the development of such a project language is given and the relevance of this for design is argued for. To support the development of a project language a toolkit is provided in which methods are compiled that respects the creative side of ordinary language.

Software engineering has for two decades been be the object of attraction to a discussion concerning existing differences between the practice and theory, contradictions concerning human and social issues, and the mathematically inspired view on the development process. For the recent years there have been an increasing interest in using ethnographic methods with epistemologies from within sociology. The today applied ethnography on software development is mainly performed by sociologists. In the CSCW community there is an ongoing dialog between ethnographic studies of what people do with computers and the computer scientists more design oriented view. There have also been studies of software developers work practices. This paper aim at collecting and showing some of these performed ethnographic studies, and their claimed results out of what we consider relevant as software engineers. In short, what and why is said about software development resulting from the use of ethnographic metho...

Software engineering and ethnography has fundamental different perspectives on practice, and different aims. Is it possible to use results from ethnographic studies when doing software-engineering research? In this article some of these problems are taken up and exemplified by trying to use some ethnographic inspired studies to shed some light on a comparison of two different philosophical understandings of what the software development process is about.

Abstract. This paper examines reading as done by programmers engaged in software development. Reading is an activity we feel should be of fundamental interest to studies of programming, but the practical achievement of which has not been closely examined. We give examples of programmers reading in pairs, and reading alone, and show reading in both cases to be explainable in terms of shared social practices. These practices are not determined by the code but nor are they purely socially constructed; rather they lie in the linkage between the code and programmers ’ ways of reading the code. We discuss (1) how features of day-to-day coding work create pertinent occasions for reading a certain piece of code, (2) how programmers order and expect there to be an order to code, and (3) how programmers have ways of analysing code in order to make sense of it. This is an ethnomethodological study that draws from ethnographic fieldwork at a professional software development company.