Social software engineering
Social Software Engineering (SSE) is a branch of software engineering that is concerned with the social aspects of software development. Whereas it is difficult to give an exact definition for the field, the participants of the 1st International Workshop on Social Software Engineering and Applications (SoSEA 2008) [1] proposed the following characterization:
- Community-centered: Software is produced and consumed by and/or for a community rather than focusing on individuals
- Collaboration/collectiveness: Exploiting the collaborative and collective capacity of human beings
- Companionship/relationship: Making explicit the various associations among people
- Human/social activities: Software is designed consciously to support human activities and to address social problems
- Social inclusion: Software should enable social inclusion enforcing links and trust in communities
Thus, SSE can be defined as "the application of processes, methods, and tools to enable community-driven creation, management, deployment, and use of software in online environments".[2] According to Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page without content in them (see the help page)., two aspects are central to SSE: "It is focused on lightweight, community-centered collaboration and uses online environments to share artifacts and knowledge about a software product."
One of the main observations in the field of SSE is that the concepts, principles, and technologies made for social software applications are applicable to software development itself as software engineering is inherently a social activity. SSE is not limited to specific activities of software development. Accordingly, tools have been proposed supporting different parts of SSE, for instance, social system design or social requirements engineering[3]
References
- ^ 1st International Workshop on Social Software Engineering and Applications (SoSEA 2008)
- ^ Imed Hammouda, Jan Bosch, Mehdi Jazayeri, Tommi Mikkonen: First International Workshop on Social Software Engineering and Applications (SoSEA 2008). In: Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2008). IEEE, 2008, pp. 531-532.
- ^ Steffen Lohmann, Sebastian Dietzold, Philipp Heim, Norman Heino: A Web Platform for Social Requirements Engineering. In: Software Engineering 2009 (Workshops). GI, 2009, pp. 309-315.