Building a Theory of Job Rotation in Software Engineering from an Instrumental Case Study

Job Rotation is an organizational practice in which individuals are frequently moved from a job (or project) to another in the same organization. Studies in other areas have found that this practice has both negative and positive effects on individuals' work. However, there are only few studies addressing this issue in software engineering so far. The goal of our study is to investigate the effects of job rotation on work related factors in software engineering by performing a qualitative case study on a large software organization that uses job rotation as an organizational practice. We interviewed senior managers, project managers, and software engineers that had experienced this practice. Altogether, 48 participants were involved in all phases of this research. Collected data was analyzed using qualitative coding techniques and the results were checked and validated with participants through member checking. Our findings suggest that it is necessary to find balance between the positive effects on work variety and learning opportunities, and negative effects on cognitive workload and performance. Further, the lack of feedback resulting from constant movement among projects and teams may have a negative impact on performance feedback. We conclude that job rotation is an important organizational practice with important positive results. However, managers must be aware of potential negative effects and deploy tactics to balance them. We discuss such tactics in this article.