A Look at Typical Difficulties in Practical Software Development from the Developer Perspective--A Field Study and a First Solution Proposal with UPEX

In the first part of this paper we summarize the results of a questionnaire for software professionals which we, the Software Engineering Group at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, handed out to (local) small and medium-sized IT businesses. The questionnaire targeted the true state of the art in practical software development with a focus on questions regarding the benefits and drawbacks of standard methodologies and all forms of user participation in such an environment. Especially interesting for us was the degree of customer integration into the development process, the understandability of used notations from the developer and user perspective, and the possible reasons for difficulties in the interaction between customer and developer teams. In the second part we present a first look at the UPEX methodology which takes into account the results of the questionnaire