A Field Study of the Software Design Process for 1arge

THE NEED FOR ECOLOGICAL DATA IN TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH MCC, The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, is a research consortium whose Software Technology Program was tasked by its member companies to create technology that dramatically improves software productivity and quality. This program has focused its research on the upstream portion of the software development process, since the empirical literature suggests that requirements and design decisions exert tremendous impact on software productivity, quality, and costs throughout the life cycle [%I. From the beginning, the program was committed to problemdriven, rather than technology-driven, research [46]. To pursue problem-driven research, an empirical studies group was established to assess the upstream factors in our member companies’ development environments that reduced software productivity and quality. Some members of our team have been proponents of quantitative and experimental methods in software engineering research [18, 20-221. We judged these methods insufficient, however, for providing insight into our member companies’ problems early enough to