Behavioral Science of Software Engineering

Large-scale software development is a sociotechnical activity only bounded by human imagination, ingenuity, and creativity. It involves teams of developers progressing by coordinating their activities and communicating their bottlenecks, goals, and advancements toward the wider goal of creating large, high-quality software systems. The stakeholders they serve are diverse (for example, clients, infrastructure providers, open source communities, project managers, and regulatory authorities), and often they have many competing, implicit requirements. But, as the political and legal implications of algorithms and data (https://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html) increasingly affect society, it is imperative that the systems the developers build are high quality in terms of accurately embodying all of those requirements.