Folklore in Software Engineering: A Definition and Conceptual Foundations

TL;DR

This paper defines and analyzes folklore in software engineering, exploring its forms, significance, and impact on practitioners through literature review and interviews, establishing a foundation for further ethnographic and reflective studies.

Contribution

It introduces a formal definition of software engineering folklore, linking it to narratives, myths, and rituals, and demonstrates its relevance through empirical interviews with practitioners.

Findings

Folklore influences developer identity and values.

Practitioners recognize and transmit folklore informally.

Explicitly studying folklore can improve reflective practice.

Abstract

We explore the concept of folklore within software engineering, drawing from folklore studies to define and characterize narratives, myths, rituals, humor, and informal knowledge that circulate within software development communities. Using a literature review and thematic analysis, we curated exemplar folklore items (e.g., beliefs about where defects occur, the 10x developer legend, and technical debt). We analyzed their narrative form, symbolic meaning, occupational relevance, and links to knowledge areas in software engineering. To ground these concepts in practice, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 industrial practitioners in Sweden to explore how such narratives are recognized or transmitted within their daily work and how they affect it. Synthesizing these results, we propose a working definition of software engineering folklore as informally transmitted, traditional, and emergent narratives and heuristics enacted within occupational folk groups that shape identity, values, and collective knowledge. We argue that making the concept of software engineering folklore explicit provides a foundation for subsequent ethnography and folklore studies and for reflective practice that can preserve context-effective heuristics while challenging unhelpful folklore.