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The Impact of Employee Participation on the Use of an Electronic Process Guide: A Longitudinal Case Study
March/April 2008 (vol. 34 no. 2)
pp. 212-225
Many software companies disseminate process knowledge through electronic process guides. A common problem with such guides is that they are not used in practice. Through a case study we investigated how involvement in creating an electronic process guide through process workshops influenced the use of the process guide. We studied developer and project manager usage through three aspects: Use frequency, used functionality and reported advantages and disadvantages. We collected data from three rounds of interviews and 19 months of usage logs in a longitudinal study in a medium-size software company. Workshop participants show a higher degree of usage, use a larger number of functions, and express more advantages and disadvantages than non-participants. Our study suggests that employee involvement has a long-term positive effect on electronic process guide usage.
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Index Terms:
Organizational management and coordination, Human Factors in Software Design, Software Engineering Process, Process infrastructure, Process implementation and change, Software process models, Software Quality/SQA
Citation:
Torgeir Dingsøyr, Nils Brede Moe, "The Impact of Employee Participation on the Use of an Electronic Process Guide: A Longitudinal Case Study," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 212-225, Mar./Apr. 2008, doi:10.1109/TSE.2007.70767
