The Ripple Effects of Role Transitions and Reorganizations
Many of you probably know that I have a soft spot for the softer side of software engineering research…
Along those lines, I’ve been discussing an important question with Daniel Graziotin: How do role transitions and reorganizations impact software development?
If you’ve worked in a software organization of a certain size, you’ve probably seen it firsthand:
- Teams being split, merged, or recomposed.
- Job profiles constantly evolving.
- Colleagues leaving, retiring, or moving to different roles.
These changes are common, but what do they mean for how we build software?
- What if the one person maintaining a crucial developer tool retires and a more junior colleague takes over?
- What if a company changes its operating model and, as a consequence, development-related role profiles?
- What if Conway’s law happened and after a reorg the teams are not aligned with software service boundaries anymore?
There’s plenty of research on organizational and role changes in general, but surprisingly little focused specifically on software development. That’s exactly what we want to explore with our survey: https://survey-uni-bayreuth-tivian.de/uc/role-transitions-and-reorgs/
We’re looking for participants currently working in software development roles at a company or organization; and of course we’re also looking for reposts :-)