Motivations for collaboration in software design decision making

Abstract

Software design is a result of software design decisions made at different stages of the development process and these decisions are often made collaboratively. As part of an ongoing research project to understand and improve this collaborative process we have interviewed 13 designers about their design processes. In this paper we report on a preliminary analysis of our interview data focusing on why people collaborate around design decisions. We found that designers collaborate to improve their design decisions, save or share decision making effort, and in response to social or organizational work contexts.