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Preliminary Findings about the Nature of Work in Software Engineering: An Exploratory Survey

Published: 08 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Context: Work Design refers to the different ways in which a given work or task can be designed and performed. The study of work design is important because every decision related to how the work is performed can affect the outcomes of individuals and the effectiveness of teamwork. Goal: To investigate work design characteristics of software engineering work and identify areas for future research. Method: We performed a survey with professional software engineers working in different commercial software companies in Brazil. We sent invitations to just over 150 professionals and received 77 valid answers from participants working in 35 distinct software companies. We measured 21 work design constructs, as well as job burnout, role conflict, role ambiguity, and two constructs related to job rotation. Results: Comparisons of our sample with other sample consisting of a diversity of professions showed that software engineering work has distinct characteristics, but some results require further investigation. Conclusion: We identified relevant characteristics of software engineering work and areas for further research. In particular, longitudinal studies are needed to address the temporal variations impossible to identify in cross sectional studies.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEM '16: Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
September 2016
457 pages
ISBN:9781450344272
DOI:10.1145/2961111
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: 08 September 2016

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Author Tags

  1. job burnout
  2. job characteristics
  3. job rotation
  4. software engineering
  5. survey research
  6. work design

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ESEM '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 27 of 122 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 130 of 594 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Perceptions of Task Interdependence in Software Development: An Industrial Case Study2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE58964.2023.00022(127-137)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2022)Understanding the relationships between the perceptions of burnout and instability in Software EngineeringProceedings of the XXXVI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3555228.3555251(58-67)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2022
  • (2022)The Role of Job Specialization in the Software IndustryInformation Technology and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-96293-7_28(307-317)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Practitioners’ Testimonials about Software Testing2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER50967.2021.00070(582-589)Online publication date: Mar-2021
  • (2019)Work design and job rotation in software engineeringProceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1109/CHASE.2019.00040(139-146)Online publication date: 27-May-2019
  • (2018)An initial understanding of task interdependence in software engineeringProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3195836.3195851(21-28)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
  • (2017)Toward Understanding Work Characteristics in Software EngineeringACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/3011286.301130641:6(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2017
  • (2017)Uses, Benefits, and Limitations of Job Rotation in Software EngineeringACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/3011286.301130041:6(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2017
  • (2017)Autonomy in software engineeringProceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1109/ESEM.2017.35(229-234)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2017
  • (2017)Analysis of the understanding of the concepts of task and skill variety by software engineering professionalsProceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1109/ESEM.2017.33(217-222)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2017
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