Representations of user feedback in an agile, collocated software team

Support requests are a major source of feedback in software development. However, like sentences whispered in a children´s telephone game, as an issue moves through a software development process, it may undergo many changes, making it difficult to ensure that the problem reported was actually fixed. To better understand how software teams preserve the integrity of user-reported issues, we observed a software team over a 6-month period, analyzing the trajectory of user requests through their software development processes. Our observations revealed several representations of issues, highlighting several points where information about an issue was lost or transformed. Although this information loss appeared to be unavoidable as an issue went through the resolution process, we found it was offset by a web of transactive memory distributed throughout the support and product teams. This memory was reinforced by asynchronous chat about recent and commonly reported issues, and shared notions of what issues should be considered severe or urgent.