The challenges of staying together while moving fast

Abstract

We report on the results of an empirical study conducted with 35 experienced software developers from 22 high-tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, and others. The goal of the study was to elicit challenges that these developers face, potential solutions that they envision to these challenges, and research initiatives that they think would deliver useful results. Challenges identified by the majority of the study participants relate to the collaborative nature of the work: the availability and discoverability of information, communication, collaborative planning and integration with work of others. Almost all participants also addressed the advantages and disadvantages of the current "fast to the market" trend, and the toll it takes on the quality of the software that they are able to deliver and on their professional and personal satisfaction as software engineers. We describe in depth the identified challenges, supporting our findings with explicit quotes from the study participants. We also put these findings in context of work done by the software engineering community and outline a roadmap for possible future research initiatives.