  This paper presents an approach to the study of cognitive activities in
collaborative software development. This approach has been developed by a
multidisciplinary team made up of software engineers and cognitive
psychologists. The basis of this approach is to improve our understanding of
software development by observing professionals at work. The goal is to derive
lines of conduct or good practices based on observations and analyses of the
processes that are naturally used by software engineers. The strategy involved
is derived from a standard approach in cognitive science. It is based on the
videotaping of the activities of software engineers, transcription of the
videos, coding of the transcription, defining categories from the coded
episodes and defining cognitive behaviors or dialogs from the categories. This
project presents two original contributions that make this approach generic in
software engineering. The first contribution is the introduction of a formal
hierarchical coding scheme, which will enable comparison of various types of
observations. The second is the merging of psychological and statistical
analysis approaches to build a cognitive model. The details of this new
approach are illustrated with the initial data obtained from the analysis of
technical review meetings.
