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.