STRIDE is a £1 million project on socio-technical resilience in software development and is looking for people who do software engineering work in a research context (including both those who do and do not currently identify as RSE’s) to take part in a survey.

The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is entering its second year. The psychology arm of the STRIDE team (Professor Mark Levine and Dr. Melanie Langer at Lancaster University) have developed a 15-20 minute survey to investigate the psychological factors associated with individual and socio-technical resilience - including the RSE identity itself.

Professor Levine and Dr. Langer were guided by input from their RSE colleagues in developing the survey, which focuses on participants’ attitudes towards automation and concerns about skill loss, the degree of participants’ professional autonomy and the nature of their professional outcomes (e.g. success, satisfaction, meaningfulness, communication), participants’ levels of resilience (including the socio-technical resilience of the systems they work on), and participants’ tendencies in how they manage obstacles and threat - in addition to participants’ level of identification with the RSE identity.

This project fits in with STRIDE’s larger focus on recentering people within the field of software engineering, as well as with an advocacy mission of better understanding and bringing greater attention to the role of software engineering in research and those who do it, across disciplines. The STRIDE researchers - an interdisciplinary team led by Helen Sharp at the Open University, with additional members at the OU, Manchester University, and Professor Levine and Dr. Langer at Lancaster University - seek to identify the software development practices underlying resilience and how to promote them. The current study, along with two projects occurring in parallel that rely on computational text analysis techniques, constitute STRIDE’s first step in using social psychology to pursue these goals.

Professor Levine and Dr. Langer welcome and deeply appreciate all participants who engage in any amount of software engineering within any field of research. All data will be collected anonymously, and participants will be free to withdraw from the study at any time. Results will be disseminated in journal articles and conference talks, as well as in a follow-up blog post here on our website. 

Participation will be compensated £4.50 (in the form of a voucher to make participation accessible regardless of location) and take 15-20 minutes.

Take part in the survey here.

The researchers ask you to please share it with anyone in your circles who does software engineering work in research, in an effort to hit their target of 395 responses for a fully powered study.

The STRIDE team thanks the Software Sustainability Institute, its members, and all participants for their support and involvement.