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Ethnography of software maintenance activities in an industrial engineering setup

Published: 24 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

New technical and procedural interventions are less likely to be adopted in industry, unless they are smoothly integrated into the existing practices of professionals. In this paper, we provide a case study of the use of ethnographic methods for studying software bug-fixing activities at an industrial engineering conglomerate. We aimed at getting an in-depth understanding of software developers' everyday practices in bug-fixing related projects and in turn inform the design of novel productivity tools. The use of ethnography has allowed us to look at the social side of software maintenance practices. In this paper, we highlight 1) organizational issues that influence bug-fixing activities, 2) social role of bug tracking systems, and 3) social issues specific to different phases of bug-fixing activities.

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  1. Ethnography of software maintenance activities in an industrial engineering setup

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    APCHI '13: Proceedings of the 11th Asia Pacific Conference on Computer Human Interaction
    September 2013
    420 pages
    ISBN:9781450322539
    DOI:10.1145/2525194
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 24 September 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. design
    2. ethnography
    3. software bug-fixing

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    • (2024)Prototyping Applications for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation With Kinesthesic Haptic TechnologyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.351516212(186730-186739)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2016)An Evaluation Methodology of the Relation Between Personality Profiles and Academic Performance in Students of Information SystemsProceedings of the XII Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems on Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems: Information Systems in the Cloud Computing Era - Volume 110.5555/3021955.3022003(285-292)Online publication date: 17-May-2016

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