Wide-Field Ethnography: Studying Software Engineering in 2025 and Beyond

This paper presents a vision of how the Internet of Things will impact the study of software engineering by 2025 and beyond. The following questions guide this inquiry. What will it mean to be able to deploy hundreds of sensors and data collectors running concurrently over months to gather very large and rich datasets of the physical, digital, and social aspects of software engineering organizations and the products and services those organizations create? How might such datasets change the types of research questions that can be addressed? What sort of tools will be needed to allow interdisciplinary communities of researchers to collaboratively analyse such datasets? How might such datasets help us understand the principles governing the interplay of physical, cyber, and social aspects of software engineering and its products, and automate aspects of such systems?