Participation in software projects as professional communities of practice: A model

Cultivating communities of practice becomes an important goal in the workplaces to promote organizational and professional development. Software development communities, with the challenges that the vertiginous evolution of technologies and the new organizational forms of the software industry suppose, are failing to enable participation of newcomers. The lack of empirical and holistic experiences to guide managers to launch and maintain communities of practice in software development motivates this study. We are also concerned with the limited perspective with which participation is defined and measured in software development studies.

The goal of the research is to design a model of participation in software development communities of practice. Specifically with this work, we aim to discuss the fundamentals sustaining the model and to present the methodology conducted to design and validate it. To obtain its first version, we conducted a methodology based on the theoretical analysis and synthesis of the related literature. In order to validate it, we designed a three-phase methodology comprising interview-based, expert-based and fuzz-cognitive-maps-based validations. By now, we have executed the interview-based study. The model that we already obtained includes contributions of other models, but it also achieves a multidimensional perspective of the phenomenon. The analysis of the interviews has enabled us to have an empirical notion of participation from different regions and workplace conditions.