Analyzing the Impact of Beliefs in Software Project Practices

Folklore and beliefs are strong in the software practitioners' community. Software engineering is a communication intensive activity. Software engineers are innovation driven and regularly use automated resources to share ideas, new paradigms and approaches to support and improve their practices. This information flow generates technical folklore and beliefs (that do not have a formal trial basis). Software engineers applying practices are influenced by these and they are inevitably taken on board in the adoption of a particular technology or practice. This paper presents an industrial case study, using a qualitative approach, to investigate the origins and impacts of beliefs on software development team practices. Its main contribution is on the understanding of creation and evolution of technical beliefs, and in studying its use for team practices improvement in the software engineering industry.