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- Dittrich, Yvonne, et al.
(author)
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Talking Design : Co-Construction and Use of Representations in Software Development
- 1999
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Software development differs from other design work insofar as the object to be designed is not visible. Representations play an important role. Even as they only describe aspects of the later software, they mediate the common design work. Software engineering literature focuses on persistent representations, documents, diagrams, mock-ups, or similar things. Our article puts 'talking design', where the software is represented in utterances, sounds, and enactment, in the centre. With the help of concepts from the CSCW discourse, we conceptualise what is happening here; the collaborative object for the design talk is not given, it has to be collectively constructed. Software development can be regarded as routine co-construction. In our case the protocol of that design meeting seemed to serve as a reminder for the participants rather than as in itself representing the design decided upon. The design meeting, we focus in this article, was part of a distributed software development project, with a larger project situated in Ronneby, Sweden and a smaller one in Oulu, Finland. If important parts of design are collectively constructed during such meetings, what does that imply for co-operation, co-ordination and division of labour in software development projects? How can a common practice be developed among distributed work groups?
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