Software Anthropology : Performing Field Studies in Software Companies

1 The authors appear in alphabetical order and contributed equally.Abstract 2 There are many things to be learned about software engineering by working directly with software practitioners in companies. In this paper, we present an overview of some of the techniques for performing such field studies, focusing on such issues as: What kind of problems can be addressed by field studies? What techniques are available for gathering data and analysis of the results? In what situations are these techniques suitable? What difficulties might the software researcher encounter when performing field studies? We illustrate the discussion with examples from our own work as well as numerous studies reported in the literature.

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