A qualitative study on project landscapes

When developers join a project, they find themselves in a new project landscape and must orient themselves quickly. To investigate the nature of this project landscape, and how we could help newcomers orient themselves, we have started an exploratory study using grounded theory. We primarily collect our data by interviewing experienced developers who recently joined ongoing projects. We are already seeing some patterns emerge. For example, it seems that newcomers find it more important to be able to experiment with the system early on than to have up-to-date and complete documentation. © 2009 IEEE.