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market and customer satisfaction. A help could be provided through a reflective atti-
tude (D. Schön [1]). A question occurs: “How to bring this reflective (and learning)
attitude into organizations and everyday work?”
Theories of action study what an actor do, in a given situation, in order to achieve
consequence or objectives. A distinction can be made between two kinds of theories
of action. Espoused theories are those that an individual claims to follow. Theories-in-
use are those that can be inferred from action [2]. Espoused theory and theory-in-use
may be inconsistent, and the agent may or may not be aware of any inconsistency. By
definition, the agent is aware of espoused theory. Theories-in-use can be made ex-
plicit by reflecting on action [2]. In the software engineering field - and especially in
Very Small Enterprises - the horizon of standards or the corporate baseline of proc-
esses and practices constitute the espoused theory, since it is what engineers claim to
follow. Although an emerging standard “Software Engineering - Lifecycle Profiles for
Very Small Enterprises (VSE)” [2] may facilitate the use of SE standards in a VSE,
what engineers do (and this action is designed and do not “just happen”) may reveal a
different theory-in-use. We believe that making explicit theories-in-use may help
software engineers to learn more suitable theories-in-use, thus contributes to improve
productivity and performance.
In this perspective, after several years of informal methods to analyze and improve
software engineers' activities, we are now using the course-of-action analysis in order
to understand the structural coupling of a software engineer with his/her environment
and especially lifecycle software processes. Let us cite a short definition of course-of-
action: “the activity of one (or several) specific actor(s), engaged in a specific situa-
tion, belonging to a specific culture, which is significant for the latter, in other words,
that can be related or commented by him (or them) at any moment [4].” The course-
of-action analysis is based on an observatory that we consider in this introduction as a
system of data collecting methods. The data necessary to study the course of action
includes continuous observations of the behavior of action and communication in a
work situation as well as different traces of other elements such as interpretations,
feelings, and judgments [4]. The analysis of this data produces a decomposition of the
global dynamic in terms of smaller units and the relations of sequencing and embed-
ding between these units. The results of this analysis may (i) help to design better
interactions or corrective situations; (ii) facilitate the reconstruction by the actor of
his/her own activity, i.e. going from “pre-reflective consciousness” towards a reflec-
tive attitude [1].
This paper is organized as follow. Section 2 presents the course-of-action frame-
work and its application to software engineering. Section 3 drafts some related work.
Section 4 discuss about the observatory of course-of-action of software engineers.
Section 5 present excerpts of a case study. We finish with perspectives.
2 Course-of-Action Applied to Software Engineers' Activity
2.1 The Course-of-Action in a Nutshell
Pinsky and Theureau, ergonomists, initiated the theoretical and methodological frame-
work of "course-of-action", summarized in one directing idea, that of the necessity of an
