“I’m Just Guiding You”: An Exploration of Software Design Mentorship within a Software Engineering Firm

Abstract

The case study presented here uses an interpretivist (qualitative, humanistic) approach to illustrate and describe a range of interactions and behaviors that occur during design meetings where mentoring and design simultaneously occur within a software engineering firm, during a portion of the design phase for a software project. It attempts to examine the interaction between two design team members (one novice and one expert) and describes how these observations intersect with the theoretical and applied literature and actual design processes. Taking cues from two theoretical descriptions of the design process, the study presented here suggests that modes and models of mentorship should be added, when applicable, as a descriptive portion of the design process.