Measuring cognitive activities in software engineering
Robillard, P.N.
d'Astous, P.
Detienne, F.
Visser, W.
Ecole Polytech. de Montreal, Que.;
This paper appears in: Software Engineering, 1998. Proceedings of the 1998 International Conference on
Publication Date: 19-25 Apr 1998
On page(s): 292-300
Meeting Date: 04/19/1998 - 04/25/1998
Location: Kyoto, Japan
ISSN: 0270-5257
ISBN: 0-8186-8368-6
References Cited: 15
INSPEC Accession Number: 5920026
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ICSE.1998.671342
Current Version Published: 2002-08-06
Abstract
This paper presents an approach to the study of cognitive
activities in collaborative software development. This approach has been
developed by a multidisciplinary team made up of software engineers and
cognitive psychologists. The basis of this approach is to improve our
understanding of software development by observing professionals at
work. The goal is to derive lines of conduct or good practices based on
observations and analyses of the processes that are naturally used by
software engineers. The strategy involved is derived from a standard
approach in cognitive science. It is based on the videotaping of the
activities of software engineers, transcription of the videos, coding of
the transcription, defining categories from the coded episodes and
defining cognitive behaviors or dialogs from the categories. This
project presents two original contributions that make this approach
generic in software engineering. The first contribution is the
introduction of a formal hierarchical coding scheme, which will enable
comparison of various types of observations. The second is the merging
of psychological and statistical analysis approaches to build a
cognitive model. The details of this new approach are illustrated with
the initial data obtained from the analysis of technical review meetings
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