There have been recent calls for research on the human side of software engineering and its impact on various factors such as productivity, developer happiness and project success. An analysis of which challenges in software engineering teams are most frequent is still missing. We aim to provide a starting point for a theory about relevant human challenges and their causes in software engineering. We establish a reusable set of challenges and start out by investigating the effect of team virtualization. Virtual teams often use digital communication and consist of members with different nationalities. We designed a survey instrument and asked respondents to assess the frequency and criticality of a set of challenges, separated in context "within teams" as well as "between teams and clients", compiled from previous empiric work, blog posts and pilot survey feedback. For the team challenges, we asked if mitigation measures were already in place. Respondents were also asked to provide information about their team setup. The survey also measured Schwartz human values. Finally, respondents were asked if there were additional challenges at their workplace. We report on the results obtained from 192 respondents. We present a set of challenges that takes the survey feedback into account and introduce two categories of challenges; "interpersonal" and "intrapersonal". We found no evidence for links between human values and challenges. We found some significant links between the number of distinct nationalities in a team and certain challenges, with less frequent and critical challenges occurring if 2-3 different nationalities were present compared to a team having members of just one nationality or more than three. A higher degree of virtualization seems to increase the frequency of some human challenges.
翻译:最近有人呼吁对软件工程的人类方面及其对生产力、开发者幸福和项目成功等各种因素的影响进行研究。对软件工程团队中最经常遇到的挑战的分析仍然缺乏。我们的目标是为有关人类挑战及其原因的软件工程理论提供一个起点。我们建立了一套可重复使用的挑战,并从调查团队虚拟化的影响开始。虚拟团队经常使用数字通信,由不同国籍的成员组成。我们设计了一个调查工具,请答卷人评估一系列挑战的频率和关键性,这些挑战在“团队内部”以及“团队和客户之间”中被区分开来。根据以往的创业工作、博客文章和试点调查反馈,我们想为这些挑战提供一个起点。关于团队挑战的理论,我们问是否已经制定了缓解措施。我们还请答卷人提供有关团队组建的信息。调查还测量了Schwartz人的价值。最后,问答卷人是否在其工作场所还存在更多挑战。我们报告192个答卷人获得的结果。我们介绍一系列挑战,将调查反馈考虑在内,并介绍两种挑战类别;“人际间或人际之间联系的频率比我们发现有不同或不同国籍之间的重要联系程度。我们发现,在三个人际和不同国籍之间没有发现有某种重要联系。我们发现有不同程度的挑战。我们发现有不同的证据。