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Shalaka Dighe |
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Ethnographic Study of Software Engineering Community Through An HCI Lens Under the Guidance of Prof. Anirudha Joshi RPC: Prof. N. L. Sarda - CSE and Prof. Alka Hingorani - IDC Abstract: It has been over three decades since the dawn of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)which has since grown as compelling discipline that asserts due consideration in the development of software. Software Engineering (SE) also recognizes the relevance of HCI methods in SE processes in their research. Nevertheless, there appear to be major gaps between HCI and SE in both theory and practice. A review of SE literature reveals that, there is still a lot to be desired with regards to references of HCI activities in SE processes, and both the fields appear to be severely disjointed. In practice, there is a substantiallack of mutual understanding among software engineers and HCI specialists, and research testimonies from their respective fields do not appear to be strongly influencing this interaction. If researchers have been extensively advocating inclusion of HCI practices in SE for more than three decades, and recent studies do not show encouraging reports on the entrenchment of HCI in SE practices, clearly the gap is rooted somewhere in the practical and sociological aspects of software development. Our research takes an ethnographic approach to understanding how software development works in practice, what is the role of the HCI practitioners, and what are the possible deterrents to the integration of HCI activities in the development of software. Indian IT sector born as early as 1968 and continually seeing exponential growth to over 3.1 million people employed in this sector as of 2014. It has also evolved from the initial era of‘staff augmentation’ services to the current state of specialized software engineering and IT business consulting. Since such consulting needs close interactions with their clients, most organizations work in an ‘onsite-offshore’ engagement model with the customer to achieve cost arbitrage. Clearly, we are looking at a ‘culture’ that resides within these organizations, and the members of these culture sharing distinct experiences, events, behaviour patterns, and even to an extent, language. Ethnography is the study of cultures through observation, participation and interpretation. Since our research is directed to the practical and sociological aspects of software development, we conduct ethnographic studies of software engineering community and its practices as an exploratory method to identify the aforementioned gaps in HCI and SE.The study attempts first hand and also first time insights, into the HCI practices in SE domain from a social perspective and to gain comprehensive understanding of how work is organized in SE processes and its implications to HCI practices.
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