Imagery from BeamCoffer dataset

BeamCoffer Dataset

In February 2014, as part of an ethnographic study of a small, 10-year old software development company in the Seattle area, I deployed a set of GoPro cameras, Zoom H2n audio recorders, and screen capture software. Over the course of 11 days, I  gathered 6 TB of raw data (video, audio, screen capture, photos, time-lapse photos, field notes, interviews) of the software developers and their colleagues doing their normal day-to-day work. We refer to this as the BeamCoffer dataset (BeamCoffer is a pseudonym).

The purpose was to gather data to allow us and our colleagues to study how professional software developers collaborate on their actual work in their workplace. The study subjects consented to allowing us to share data with researchers outside our research group, so please contact me if you are interested in using this dataset.

More details of the dataset are available in the technical report BeamCoffer Dataset: Professional Software Developers Collaborating in the Wild.

Research articles using BeamCoffer data:

  • Roth, W.-M., Socha, D., & Tenenberg, J. (2020). How actions and words come to make sense in a continuously changing world of work: a case study from software development. Semiotica.
  • Roth, W.-M. (2018). The gap between instruction (plan) and situated action—A challenge to semiotics? Semiotica, 221, 1–27.
  • Roth, W.-M., & Jornet, A. (2018). From object-oriented to fluid ontology: a case study of the materiality of design work in agile software development. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 27, 37–75.
  • Roth, W.-M., Socha, D., & Tenenberg, J. (2016). Becoming-design in corresponding: re/theorizing the co- in codesigning. CoDesign, 13, 1–15.
  • Roth, W.-M., Tenenberg, J., & Socha, D. (2016). Discourse/s in/of CSCW. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 25, 385–407.
  • Tenenberg, J., Roth, W.-M., & Socha, D. (2015). From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). doi:10.1007/s10606-014-9215-0
  • Socha, D., Adams, R., Franznick, K., Roth, W.-M., Sullivan, K., Tenenberg, J., and Walter, S. (2016). Wide-Field Ethnography: Studying Software Engineering in 2025 and Beyond. In Visions of 2025 and Beyond (V2025) Track of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering. (Best Paper award)
  • Socha, D., Jornet, A., & Adams, R. (2016). Wide Field Ethnography and Exploratory Analysis of Large Ethnographic Datasets. In CSCW 2016 Workshop: Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science.
  • Ramachandra, S., Chen, M., Socha, D. (2016). Laughter Detection Using Data Mining and Human Feedback. Proceedings of the 2016 7th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS 2016).
  • Socha, D., & Tenenberg, J. (2015). Sketching and Conceptions of Software Design. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2015). ACM.
  • Socha, D., & Sutanto, K. (2015). The “Pair” as a Problematic Unit of Analysis for Pair Programming. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2015). ACM.
  • Socha, D., Frever, T., & Zhang, C. (2015). Using a Large Whiteboard Wall to Support Software Development Teams. In Proceedings of the 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’15) (pp. 5065–5072). doi:10.1109/HICSS.2015.600
  • Tenenberg, J., Socha, D., & Roth, W.-M. (2014). Designerly ways of being. In Proceedings of DTRS 10 Symposium. West Lafayette, IN.
  • Socha, D., & Tenenberg, J. (2013). Navigating Constraints: The Design Work of Professional Software Developers. In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Paris, France.
  • Socha, D., & Tenenberg, J. (2013). Sketching Software in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013) (pp. 1237–1240).

UW Bothell master’s student capstone papers using BeamCoffer data:

  • Miles Dowe (2018). Informing a Laughter Recognition Algorithm Through Qualitative Coding.
  • Sneha Vasisht (2017). Video-based People Tracking. (Chair: Dr. Chen)
  • Mark Carfaro (2016). A Web System in Support of Wide-Field Ethnography (Chair: Dr. Socha)
  • Shalini Ramachandra (2016). Laughter Detection Using Data Mining and Human Feedback. (Chair: Dr. Chen)
  • Wei Wang (2016). Building Cloud Based Software Systems to Support Collaborative Analysis of Large, Multi-stream, Multi-modal Datasets of Physical-Cyber-Social Systems. (Chair: Dr. Socha)