An Empirical Research On The Shared Mental Models Of Software Developers

Shared mental models(SMM) are knowledge structures held by members of a team that enable them to form accurate explanations and expectations for the task, and in turn, to coordinate their actions and adapt their behavior to demands of the task and other team members. This research focuses on software developers, employing referring to literatures, interview, and questionnaire to research the context of SMM in software developping groups,applying canonical correlation analysis to research its relationship with attitude variables,offering certain theory for software principle to manage his/her group better.Five parts are included in this research:The first part summarizes the concepts of SMM, the structure of SMM, the measures of SMM, the evolvement of SMM ,then points out the shortage of the past research. This part provides the theoretical significance for the next investigation.The second part studies on the SMM of software developers by exploratory factor analysis. Through analysis, the SMM of software developers include six factors. And through the confirmatory factor analysis, this six factor model is the best.The third part constructs a scale-"The software developers'SMM scale".It's composed of twenty-four items which are tested twice and modified. The analysis of the reliability coefficient and the validity coefficient to the whole scale shows its reliablity.The forth part applies the canonical correlation analysis and researches the correlation between the SMM of software developers and attitude variables, the result proves the significant correlation between the two above.The fifth part probes into the effect of population variables on the score of SMM by One-way ANOVA, SNK and T Test.