A Meeting and A Whiteboard (describing the power to speak)

摘要

The aim of this paper is to discuss the use of ethnography in studies of software development practice, by way of an example, and the development of questions, a working hypothesis and discussion points from observational material. The example is small - a single meeting that took place between three members of the software development team, working in-house, on a large insurance system. This project involved a high degree of user participation, and the company was employing object technology, and use cases for the first time. There were two additional participants in that meeting, a consultant who was employed to teach the writing of use cases to the user group, and myself, as ethnographer, employed by the consultant. Very briefly, ethnography involves attending to the cultural details and dynamics of self-described communities. Such study involves observation, interviews, and the analysis of practices, artefacts, and documentation. The most significant feature of ethnography is the primacy of the written account For an overview of the uses of ethnography in IT see Beynon-Davies, 1995. The example below is presented as three different accounts - my initial notes, another participant's view of the meeting, and a more developed account which begins to ask questions, and suggest a working hypothesis for discussion. The different accounts reflect the perspectival nature of this kind of work, and its quality of developing over time, and through discussion. The suggestion made at the end, is a suggestion made on the basis of a careful consideration of the event in question. It is no more, or less, than that, and is up for testing and discussion. What I hope to show here is that that multiple facets of the mundane activities with which we are all too familiar, profoundly shape those activities and consequently influence what we can do, and cannot, and how we get to do those things. Ethnography provides one way of addressing these aspects of day-to-day working life, making the implicit explicit, and brings with it a particular set of options and constraints.