Att dokumentera vid systemutveckling - en arbetsuppgift sedd ur systemutvecklarens perspektiv

Abstract

Software Engineering has been performed for at least four decades. During this time the role of documentation in the Software Process has been debated.The role and the importance of documentation have been discussed from the organizations point of view. To improve quality and make work more efficient methods and standards have been developed to manage the Software Process and documentation in particular.The objective of the study was to contribute with new knowledge about documentation work seen from the perspective of system developers. By studying the documentation work from the Behavioral Science point of view we will gain new knowledge that can open up for new approaches in the research area and widen the discussion about Software documentation. In this study we tried to answer two questions: How can documentation work be described as a work task? How does the system developer experience documentation work? The study was performed using Grounded Theory to initiate the collection of empirical data. Through individual half structured in-depth interviews and informal observations data was collected. Hackman and Oldham’s (1997)Model of Motivation was applied to present the result of the study. The result have shown that documentation work as a work task does not show the characteristics of meaningfulness,autonomy and feedback that the system developer need to be motivated by performing the task. The system developers experience the documentation work as less meaningful. They want to minimize the effort to perform the documentation work by standardization. The system developer’s knowledge of the result of their work is poor.