The social developer: The future of software development [guest editors' introduction]

Abstract

Contemporary Software Engineering has inevitably become much more social. Due to the size, complexity, and diversity of today's software systems, there is a need to interact across organizational, geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries. Large-scale software development now implies active user involvement and requires close cooperation and collaboration between team members and all types of development activities. Members of software projects across all roles must communicate and interact continuously with other project members as well as with a variety of stakeholders, such as users, analysts, suppliers, customers, and business partners. This theme issue aims to inform software engineering practitioners about current trends and recent advances in research and practice of sociotechnical analysis and support for large-scale software development.