Software engineering is a socio-technical endeavor, and while many of our contributions focus on technical aspects, human stakeholders such as software developers are directly affected by and can benefit from our research and tool innovations. In this paper, we question how much of our research addresses human and social issues, and explore how much we study human and social aspects in our research designs. To answer these questions, we developed a socio-technical research framework to capture the main beneficiary of a research study (the who ), the main type of research contribution produced (the what ), and the research strategies used in the study ( how we methodologically approach delivering relevant results given the who and what of our studies). We used this Who-What-How framework to analyze 151 papers from two well-cited publishing venues—the main technical track at the International Conference on Software Engineering, and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal by Springer—to assess how much this published research explicitly considers human aspects. We find that although a majority of these papers claim the contained research should benefit human stakeholders, most focus predominantly on technical contributions. Although our analysis is scoped to two venues, our results suggest a need for more diversification and triangulation of research strategies. In particular, there is a need for strategies that aim at a deeper understanding of human and social aspects of software development practice to balance the design and evaluation of technical innovations. We recommend that the framework should be used in the design of future studies in order to steer software engineering research towards explicitly including human and social concerns in their designs, and to improve the relevance of our research for human stakeholders.

中文翻译：

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软件工程研究的谁、什么、如何：一个社会技术框架

软件工程是一项社会技术工作，虽然我们的许多贡献都集中在技术方面，但软件开发人员等人类利益相关者会直接受到我们的研究和工具创新的影响并从中受益。在本文中，我们质疑我们的研究有多少涉及人类和社会问题，并探讨我们在研究设计中研究了多少人类和社会方面。为了回答这些问题，我们开发了一个社会技术研究框架来捕捉研究的主要受益者（谁）、产生的研究贡献的主要类型（什么）以及研究中使用的研究策略（我们如何考虑到我们研究的对象和内容，方法论方法提供相关结果）。我们使用这个 Who-What-How 框架分析了来自两个被广泛引用的出版场所的 151 篇论文 - 国际软件工程会议的主要技术轨道和 Springer 的经验软件工程期刊 - 以评估该研究明确发表的数量考虑人的方面。我们发现，尽管这些论文中的大多数声称所包含的研究应该使人类利益相关者受益，但大多数主要关注技术贡献。尽管我们的分析仅限于两个地点，但我们的结果表明需要对研究策略进行更多的多样化和三角化。特别是，需要旨在更深入地了解软件开发实践的人类和社会方面的策略，以平衡技术创新的设计和评估。