Further, to get more insight into the existing PD, the interviewees were also invited to share their internal documents describing their process and to share their experience with a specific PD task that was identified before the interview took place. However, due to confidentiality reasons, these documents are not publishable.
All interviewees were asked for recording permission before starting, and all interviews agreed to be recorded and to be anonymously quoted for this paper. Each interview lasted between 60 and 120 minutes and was transcribed verbatim. To improve the reliability of the collected data, at least two of the authors participated in each interview session.
Taken together, this study includes seven focus interviews with 16 practitioners from four companies, where each interview included between 1 to 6 participants (according to the participants’ preferences). Given the exploratory purpose, the interaction among participants was important to understand the possible dynamics of how PD was accumulated. For confidentiality, interviewees and their companies are kept anonymous.
Cases description
To provide more context for our study, this section describes the involved participants in more detail. All case companies have an extensive range of software development activities, specializing in different business and application domains.
Company A develops software applications used within the car manufacturing industry. Company B develops software for water processing applications. Company C develops software used in applications such as, e.g., cars and IoT types of equipment. Company D develops software applications used in the energy and power production section.
Participants
As illustrated in Table II, the interviewees work at companies operating in several different business domains, and they have several roles.