Dwelling in Software: Aspects of the Felt-Life of Engineers in Large Software Projects

Abstract

The organizational and social aspects of software engineering (SE) are now increasingly well investigated. This paper proposes that there are a number of approaches taken in research that can be distinguished not by their method or topic but by the different views they construct of the human agent acting in SE. These views have implications for the pragmatic outcome of the research, such as whether systems design suggestions are made, proposals for the development of practical reasoning tools or the effect of Social Network Systems on engineer's sociability. This paper suggests that these studies tend to underemphasize the felt-life of engineers, a felt-life that is profoundly emotional though played in reference to ideas of moral propriety and ethics. This paper will present a study of this felt-life, suggesting it consists of a form of digital dwelling. The perspective this view affords are contrasted with process and 'scientific' approaches to the human agent in SE, and with the more humanistic studies of SE reasoning common in CSCW. A recent paper in Communications of the ACM asks whether changes in software engineering (SE) represented under the moniker 'agile computing' are as applicable today as they were in the middle of the 1990s. The changes exemplified by agile computing – and various other approaches of that time (such as 'Xtreme programming', and sometimes by the more prosaic sounding 'End User Programming') -all turned around the realization that SE required more flexible processes to requirements capture and coding (Williams, 2012). Adherence to a plan came to be seen as something that should always be subordinate to the development of a product that worked and appealed even if this violated aspects of the plan. Bitter and expensive failures in the SE industry up to that time had made it clear that the right products could only be devised through constant iteration of the design and associated software engineering; this meant