Understanding Programmers Through Discourse Analysis

Working practices within software engineering are far from fixed. Practitioners continue to develop new ways to organise their work within co-operative teams and agile methods provide some of the most heavily contested approaches to development. Agile methods are predicated on the idea that improved communication between developers and management of relationships between customers and software houses will lead to better product or better projects. However, we argue that the agile promise must be grounded in established theories of talk-at-work and talk-in-interaction. Our work sets out to examine interaction within Agile teams, employing an ethnomethodological framework to help us assess the promise inherent within agility. In this paper we present analysis of interaction between two developers as they use pair-programming to help them rework some failing code.