Overview
Its aim is to understand the processes that make for good software engineering practice, and how these need to combine human and technical factors.
The Software Engineering Observatory is an empirical software engineering research facility where researchers can use a variety of methodologies to study software developers working on real industrial projects. The software developers are students, both undergraduate and postgraduate and up to 20 group projects are undertaken each year. Thus, researchers can investigate how software developers work in teams, deal with industrial clients and handle the plethora of problems that arise in group projects with tight time-scales. A key feature is that the Observatory allows multiple teams to work on identical projects concurrently in competition with each other, which allows comparisons to be made of different software development processes. The Observatory enables researchers to gather data that are relevant to many of the key issues in contemporary software engineering, which will be of interest to both academics and practitioners. The implications of the results so far are that effective software managers must not just understand the technical aspects of the work that their staff are doing, but must also understand their staff as individuals and how they can best work together in teams.
Read more about this topic: Sheffield Software Engineering Observatory