Practices of Making Code Work

Marisa Leavitt Cohn and Susan Elliott Sim (Department of Informatics)

Too often the practices of software production are neglected in our investigations of the design and use of digital technologies.  While the notion of “design” has been contested, broadened, and blurred, coding remains strictly divided from both design and use, as mere “implementation”.  However, coding clearly requires interpretation and translation of system requirements and problems in the world. Even as much of new media practice remains visual, there are latent effects of the digital (or discrete) thinking that is required to code that make their way up the technological stack. Coding is also a practice that is continually changing as new programming languages and tools emerge. While coding practice and new media use are both forms of human-computer interaction we still tend to address the interactions with computers of people who know how to code and those who do not asymmetrically. Practices such as technical writing, documentation of code, quality assurance, and testing are marginalized as insignificant to technical authorship and knowledge production. This project seeks to frame coding practice more broadly and to understand it as a form of digital practice. What is coding practice and why are some activities considered coding while others are not? What are the ethics, cultures, structures and epistemologies of software production?  We will be conducting studies of Agile and Open Source software development in order to understand the work of computer programming. We be using a combination of ethnographic and STS methods to look at software production and how code, as an artifact, mediates code work.