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The question of how to develop and maintain appropriate, socially informed and sophisticated infrastructural systems is an ongoing concern for CSCW. Information infrastructure development efforts are usually large endeavors that involve many stakeholders, including several organizations that need to interoperate with legacy systems. Projects typically take several years to develop. The duration, variety, and sites of engagement in the development of information infrastructures can be challenging to approach with typical CSCW approaches. In this paper, we compare and analyze our varied experiences in order to generate lessons learned based on being embedded for three or more years as action researchers and ethnographers in infrastructure development projects in the domains of traffic engineering, vocational education, and ocean science. Drawing upon these experiences, as well as literature in infrastructure studies, design methodologies, and organizational studies, we extract guidance for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in long-term organizationally complex system development projects. Among these lessons, we encourage revisiting previously gathered data as scope and scale change, observing changes in the discursive reference public who will benefit from the system, and planning for different intellectual points of entry and exit. This paper lays groundwork for future developments in theory and method of collaborative design and development in and with complex systems. 

Drawing from a longitudinal case study, we inspect the activities of an expanding team of scientists and their collaborators as they sought to develop a novel software pipeline that worked both for themselves and for their wider community. We argue that these two tasks - making the software work for themselves and also for their wider scientific community - could not be differentiated from each other at the beginning of the software development process. Rather, this division of labor and software capacities emerged, articulated by the actors themselves as they went about their tasks. The activities of making the novel software work at all, and the extra work of making that software repurposable or reusable could not be distinguished until near the end of the development process - rather than defined or structured in advance. We discuss implications for the trajectory of software development, and the practical work of making software repurposable.