Normative manipulation as a way of improving the performance of software engineering groups : three experiments

Abstract

As the size of Software development projects increase, so too do the number of people working on these projects. This increase of software groups have brought about a new focus on the sociological issues associated with Software Development. There is a growing body of work that seeks to understand how Software Engineers work together effectively as a group, and also to identify factors that enable increased productivity consistently. Social Psychology looks at the interactions between individuals in groups (group dynamics) and may provide an applicable means to address this increased need for enhanced group effectiveness in Software Engineering. The thesis of this research is that it is possible to apply Social Psychology research (in particular Normative Manipulation) to Software Engineering groups. It is possible to use Normative Manipulation effectively to increase the performance of Software Engineering groups in some types of tasks, and finally, this technique is adoptable by practising Software Engineering groups as it is non-intrusive. Normative Manipulation is a technique in which particular behaviours are made to be favoured by group members. This behaviour is then actively practised by all group members. These particular behaviours may in turn increase the effectiveness of groups on particular tasks - for instance, a group favouring the behaviour of objectivity would then be more inclined to assess provided on information its logical merits and may then in turn be more likely to uncover other related, but less obvious information. Since the success of elicitation and specification of Software Requirements is related to how complete the produced specification is, then it follows that such a group could possibly have increased performance in Software Elicitation and Specification tasks. We demonstrate the validity of the thesis claims by performing three studies. The first study attempts to replicate the results of a Social Psychology experiment on a sample of participants drawn from a Software Engineering population. The second study attempts to show that it is possible to affect the effectiveness of Requirements Elicitation by Software Engineering groups by instilling different norms. The third study applies Normative Manipulation on a practising Software Group to identify if the technique can be applied transparently as part of a normal Requirements Elicitation task. -- provided by Candidate. Show more