The Motivation of Software Engineers : Developing a Rigorous and Usable Model

This report presents a summary of the work undertaken in the one year EPSRC “Modelling Motivation in Software Engineering” (MoMSE) project (2005). The aim of this work is to produce a model of motivation in software engineering. We give an overview of how we developed a model of motivation in Software Engineering (SE). Our model of motivation reflects three viewpoints: 1. motivation in the SE literature; 2. classic theory of motivation to include models tailored specifically to reflect motivation in software engineering; and 3. empirical investigations into the motivation phenomenon.