The role of job specialization in Software Engineering

Abstract

The way work is structured affects several aspects of the organization, resulting in practical implications in individual, societal and organizational levels. In this context, some research on Work Design area proposed some work characteristics. However, some of them has not been deeply investigated in Software Engineering. Job Specialization is a work characteristic that have been associated to some issues related to workers' productivity in management area in the past, however, as organizational scenario has changed and also considering that software engineers may have a different perception of work characteristics, we believe that further investigation about Job Specialization is needed. The main goal of this research is to understand the role and the particularities of job specialization in Software Engineering practice. In particular, we investigated the aspects related to this factor and how it affects software engineers at work, in order to guide practitioners in managerial processes. We will use a mix method approach composed of the following phases: 1) The phase 1 of this PhD work was the development of support studies towards the identification of the research problem addressed in this research. 2) The second phase defined a research approach for collecting, analyzing and integrating quantitative and qualitative data about Job Specialization in Software Engineering. 3) In this phase we applied techniques from meta-ethnography in order to synthesize the findings of the previous three phases. 4) Finally, Phase 4 is characterized as the conclusion of this work with the development of a specialist verification about the results of this PhD work. Our analysis in quantitative data demonstrated a set of relevant correlations among job specialization and several work-related factors, such as autonomy and variety and also with some outcomes, such as burnout and satisfaction. We also investigated the relation between specialization and variety, and different from literature in other fields, findings show that specialized work can vary in terms of tasks and skills in Software Engineering.