A Mosaic of Perspectives: Understanding Ownership in Software Engineering

2025-05-20

AI Summary

This paper addresses the conceptual ambiguity surrounding developer ownership in agile development—particularly the overemphasis on code authorship—and proposes an interdisciplinary, integrative theoretical framework. Drawing on a systematic review of psychology and software engineering literature, the authors conduct conceptual synthesis and theory building to rigorously adapt psychological ownership theory to the software engineering context, establishing a four-dimensional analytical structure: psychological, social, technical, and organizational. Moving beyond static “who wrote this code” attributions, the framework foregrounds a context-sensitive, dynamic process of responsibility construction, elucidating how architectural design decisions, collaboration mechanisms, and external practices shape developers’ subjective ownership perceptions. The resulting framework provides both a theoretically grounded foundation for enhancing team effectiveness and empirically testable propositions to guide future research on ownership in agile settings.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Multiagent Systems: Agent/AI Theories and Architectures
• Application Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Psychology-informed user models and recommender systems

Abstract

Agile software development relies on self-organized teams, underlining the importance of individual responsibility. How developers take responsibility and build ownership are influenced by external factors such as architecture and development methods. This paper examines the existing literature on ownership in software engineering and in psychology, and argues that a more comprehensive view of ownership in software engineering has a great potential in improving software team's work. Initial positions on the issue are offered for discussion and to lay foundations for further research.

Problem

• Understanding ownership dynamics in Agile teams
• Exploring external factors influencing developer responsibility
• Proposing comprehensive ownership models for software teams

Innovation

• Analyzes ownership in Agile teams
• Links psychology to software ownership
• Proposes new research foundations