Software development remains mentally challenging despite the continual advancement of training, techniques, and tools. Because completely automating software development is currently impossible, it makes sense to seriously consider how tools can improve the mental activities of developers apart from automating them away. Such mental assistance can be called “cognitive support”. Understanding and developing cognitive support in software engineering tools is an important research issue but, unfortunately, at the moment our theoretical foundations for it are inadequately developed. Furthermore, much of the relevant research has occurred outside of the software engineering community, and is therefore not easily available to the researchers who typically develop software engineering tools. Tool evaluation, comparison, and development are consequently impaired. The present work introduces a theoretical framework intended to seed further systematic study of cognitive support in the field of software engineering tools. This theoretical framework, called RODS, imports ideas and methods from a field of cognitive science called “distributed cognition”. The crucial concept in RODS is that cognitive support can be understood and explained in terms of the computational advantages that are conferred when cognition is redistributed between software developer and their tools and environment. The name RODS, in fact, comes from the

. The Irish School of Constructive Mathematics ((M_c)^clubsuit), which extends the VDM, exploits an algebraic notation based upon monoids and their morphisms. [...] In this paper we exhibit an accessible bridge from classical formal methods to topos-theoretic formal methods in seeking a unifying theory.

The importance of adopting a socio-technical approach to system development is recognised by many but not widely practised. We analyse the reasons for this, considering the history of socio-technical design methods, and critiquing some of the better known socio-technical design methods to highlight problems. Based on this analysis we propose a new pragmatic framework for socio-technical systems engineering (STSE) which builds on the (largely independent) research of groups investigating work design, information systems, computer-supported cooperative work, and cognitive systems engineering. STSE bridges the traditional gap between organisational change and system development using two main types of activity: sensitisation and awareness; and constructive engagement. From the framework we identify an initial set of interdisciplinary research problems that address the engineering problem of applying socio-technical approaches in a cost-effective way, and facilitate the integration of STSE with existing systems and software engineering approaches.