Wide-Field Ethnography: Studying Software Engineering (and Other Things) in 2025 and Beyond

How might the Internet of Things impact the study of software engineering (and other types of work) by 2025 and beyond? What will it mean to be able to deploy hundreds of sensors and data collectors running concurrently over months to gather very large and rich datasets of the physical, social, economic, and digital aspects of software engineering organizations and the products and services those organizations create? How might such tools support a rich variety of modes of analysis, including both highly manual analysis (e.g., of the particulars of a few minutes of video) and automated systems of algorithms detecting and analyzing events or patterns? What sort of tools will be needed to allow interdisciplinary communities of researchers to collaboratively analyse such datasets? How might such data systems help us understand the principles governing the interplay of physical, social, economic, and cyber aspects of software engineering and its products? How might such systems help us understand how to automate aspects of such systems? How might such data systems change the types of research questions that can be addressed? How might such data systems allow inquiry into other systems of importance, such as health, entrepreneurship, design, or education?

This talk presents a vision and initial results relating to these types of questions. This vision evolved from our struggles working with a large (6 TB) dataset of video, audio, screen-capture, photos, time-lapse imagery, and interviews gathered from a software development organization over 11 days. We used multiple data collectors (e.g., nine GoPro cameras, six Zoom H2n audio recorders) running concurrently, so that we can follow work across space, time, and modality. The talk discusses opportunities and challenges of working with such a large, multi-modal, multi-channel dataset, some initial challenges on doing this type of research in business and educational settings, and our thoughts on how both opportunities and challenges will grow as researchers deploy more sensors and data collectors to gather more types of data over wider spaces over longer periods of time.

Series:
Microsoft Research Talks
Date:
Speakers:
David Socha
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Bothell

Series: Microsoft Research Talks