Ethnography, plans and software engineering

I report on some continuing research being done as part of a number of projects involving collaboration between software engineers and sociologists within the Centre for CSCW Research at Lancaster. The strategy which has evolved over these projects, and they have included studies of air traffic controllers, software engineers, technicians, office workers, bank employees, among others, is to conduct ethnographic field studies, of varying durations, in order to inform system design issues. I briefly reiterate the case for ethnography in CSCW design; secondly, using studies of software engineering, I relate the approach to trying to understand process-models-in-use within software engineering itself