Human factors in software development: On its underlying theories and the value of learning from related disciplines. A guest editorial introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Human factors play a very important role in Software Development [1]. According to Avison et al. [2] ‘‘Failure to include human factors may explain some of the dissatisfaction with conventional information systems development methodologies; they do not address real organizations’’ (p95 [2]). Software development has been characterized in essence as a human activity [3] where human factors play a critical role [4]. While the area of Human Factors spans a lot of different and diverse concepts and theories, the human factors aspects most often studied in software engineering research include coordination [5,6], collaboration in the development process [7–9], trust [10], expert recommendation [11], program comprehension [12], knowledge management [13,14] and culture [15]. The growing importance of human factors in software development research is clearly evidenced by the fact that the ICSE 2014 conference a track entirely devoted to Human factors, namely, ‘‘Social Aspects of Software Engineering’’. Furthermore, the 2014 ICSE conference keynote by James Herbsleb [16] presented the theory of socio-technical coordination and represented a call for further development of theories on coordination in Software Engineering (SE). In this editorial we not only reiterate this call, but also suggest SE researchers to draw on reference disciplines such as the field of Information Systems to borrow well-established theories. In the next section we first present empirical evidence on the importance of research involving Human Factors in the field of Software Engineering. We then run a citation analysis exercise to identify the prominent theories related to Human Factors in SD.