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Software engineering is an intensely people-oriented activity, yet too little is known about how designers, maintainers, requirements analysts and all other types of software engineers perform their work. In order to improve software engineering tools and practice, it is therefore essential to conduct field studies, i.e., to study real practitioners as they solve real problems. To do so effectively, however, requires an understanding of the techniques most suited to each type of field study task. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of techniques, focusing on those for data collection. The taxonomy is organized according to the degree of human intervention each requires. For each technique, we provide examples from the literature, an analysis of some of its advantages and disadvantages, and a discussion of how to use it effectively. We also briefly talk about field study design in general, and data analysis.

Abstract-Sociological and technical difficulties, such as a lack of informal encounters, can make it difficult for new members of noncollocated software development teams to learn from their more experienced colleagues. To address this situation, we have developed a tool, named Hipikat, that provides developers with efficient and effective access to the group memory for a software development project that is implicitly formed by all of the artifacts produced during the development. This project memory is built automatically with little or no change to existing work practices. After describing the Hipikat tool, we present two studies investigating Hipikat's usefulness in software modification tasks. One study evaluated the usefulness of Hipikat's recommendations on a sample of 20 modification tasks performed on the Eclipse Java IDE during the development of release 2.1 of the Eclipse software. We describe the study, present quantitative measures of Hipikat's performance, and describe in detail three cases that illustrate a range of issues that we have identified in the results. In the other study, we evaluated whether software developers who are new to a project can benefit from the artifacts that Hipikat recommends from the project memory. We describe the study, present qualitative observations, and suggest implications of using project memory as a learning aid for project newcomers.

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