Towards a Theory of User-Developer Cooperation

The work reported in this chapter addressed research question one: what is cooperative software development; what are the processes and activities in which users and developers are involved and how do participants, especially users, contribute to those processes and activities? Research question one was addressed through an analysis of user-developer interaction in development meetings across the projects. This analysis was based primarily on the video records of development meetings, supplemented by insights gained from the analyst’s presence at the meetings as a participant-observer and by analysis of other artefacts, described in Section 3.3.