Understanding How Information Flows in and out of Regularly Scheduled Software Maintenance Design Meetings: a Case Study

Meetings have always been a significant part of all types of work. Software development is no exception, with meetings of all kinds taking place daily. One type of meeting that is critical to software development is the Regularly Scheduled Software Maintenance Design Meeting (RSSMDM): a recurring meeting during which the primary product leads of a software development team consider emerging issues and new directions for an already deployed and functioning software system. To date, RSSMDMs have not been widely studied and particularly ignored is the perspective of the role of information in shaping the discussions in these meetings.This dissertation contributes a foundational understanding of how information flows in and out of RSSMDMs through a single case study of ten such meetings at a healthcare software company. Through a thematic analysis, it particularly characterizes the variety of information that the participants in these meetings on the one hand share and on the other hand capture while they engage in their design work. In addition, the dissertation identifies the tools that the meeting participants use to share and capture information and the various ways in which they use the tools. The results from the thematic analysis are varied, with several of the more important findings being: (1) many different types of information are shared, with the range much greater than what traditionally has been considered as important to capture for future use, (2) much of the information shared is fleeting, concerning the current state of the deployed software and the current state of its code base, (3) sharing is frequent, with new information shared on average once or twice a minute, (4) the diversity and frequency of information captured is much less than information shared, and (5) traditional design tools such as diagramming and sketching tools are not used in support of the meetings, displaced by the use of Confluence (a wiki-style knowledge repository) and Jira (an issue tracker). These and other findings establish a baseline for future research into RSSMDMs, provide insights into current practices, and offer suggestions for the development of improved tools to support participants with information sharing and information capture in RSSMDMs