What Do We Know about Developer Motivation?

s of titles and abstracts) as irrelevant to our focus. We read the remaining 519 papers in full to establish our final list. The 92 papers we chose were originally published in the ACM Sigcpr Computer Personnel, various IEEE proceedings, the Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, and the JournalofSystemsandSoftware.Thestudiesvaried hugely in how researchers measured motivation, the context in which they studied it, and the methods they used. Who are software engineers? In 1980, Daniel Cougar and Robert Zawacki were the first to report on computing personnel's motivations, extending the well-established but generic Job Characteristics Theory5 to this group.6 They reported that computing personnel need growth and learning and enjoy a challenge but have low needs for socializing. This work has significantly influenced subsequent thinking on developers' motivations. Software engineering has evolved in various ways since this early work. The context in which developers work is ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SOFTWARE
• Authors: Tracy Hall, Helen Sharp, Sarah Beecham, Nathan Baddoo, Hugh Robinson
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Sigcpr Computer Personnel, SOFTWARE 2008, Software Engineer, Various Ieee Proceedings