Research Areas
The Observatory’s research agenda includes:
- Assessing, through controlled experiments, the relative merits of software development methods and methodologies in terms of both the quality of output and the well-being of the developers.
- Devising empirically-based models of the processes that developers are observed to use
- Identifying the factors that make for good team-based software development, including leadership, the personality, skill, gender and ethnic mix of teams, and how task conflict can contribute, constructively, to enhanced performance.
- Investigating the relative importance of (a) the methodology adopted by the team and degree of fidelity to it, (b) the individual’s participant’s motivation and knowledge, and (c) team processes in accounting for variability in the performance of the group.
The data from these experiments will be made available to bona-fide researchers in empirical software engineering.
Read more about this topic: Sheffield Software Engineering Observatory
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