Software cultures

cal as well as cultural space between those groups. Although they may not be connected in ways that help create a shared understanding, they manage to develop a reasonably coherent and stable product— which will probably be used in many different places. In this article we explore some of the practices that make the accommodation of multiple places and views within a software development team possible, as well as the limitations of some of these practices. We will in particular examine how the trade-offs between multiplicity and standardization [9] are managed within software development teams. We use the term “standardization ” in a broad sense, referring to the practices, images, notations, standards, and tools that help actors to shape and align their work so that it becomes readable and usable by relevant oth-ers. Button and Sharrock [3] examine some aspects of the “methodic handling of tasks ” within software engineering as “achieving an orderly character of the work. ” We argue here that such practices not only reflect the inherently contingent nature of the task itself, but the multiplicity of places and voices involved in accomplishing the task. Our article is empirically grounded in different case studies of design practice that were discussed Exploring cultural practices in managing heterogeneity within system design. Softwar