Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on the Socio-Technical Environment of Software Development Projects

Abstract

OFTWARE engineering has long been recognized as a human activity that is managed through a system of methods, tools, processes, and work practices. This interaction between the nature of the product, the work, and the people doing it represents the socio-technical environment of a software development project. Software projects that fail to adequately consider the people’s social behavior in the context of the product and the work are less likely to be successful [2], [3]. The negative consequences of a neglected socio-technical environment are even more evident in geographically distributed software development, a project setting that has become commonplace in the last few decades. A growing body of research has adopted the sociotechnical perspective. However, the research is currently dispersed across multiple venues, including computersupported cooperative work (CSCW), computer-human interaction (CHI), software engineering, and organizational theory and behavior. As a first attempt to integrate these strands of research for software engineering, we organized workshops at ICSE 2008 and ICSE 2009. This special section builds on the success of those workshops and highlights emerging and promising lines of research that have the potential to shape future research and practice in software