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Beyond Coding: Toward Software Development Expertise
Marian Petre - Watch Now - Duration: 29:16
Based on decades of research with professional software developers, this talk will summarise some of the perspectives, practices, and social conventions that distinguish expert developers and lead to better software.
Thank you - glad you found it so!
Following my perhaps rather ambiguous question in the chat, I'll re-phase and expand upon it ... just a bit and hopefully, with more clarity. From my comprehension (I could be wrong!) true innovation follows on from the creative process. Over recent decades, certainly with the wide-spread adoption of IT Tools across the board (amongst other things), the pace of innovation has certainly quickened and widened. The knock-on effect of this is ever-increasing competition (globally, with constant pressures on time-to-market et al), ever-increasing costs of development (certainly staff renumeration) and labour-churn (including staff poaching) - a few (of many) examples that I had termed 'dynamics in play'. Basically, as teams are composed of individuals (who many can certainly think for themselves, including of themselves !!), what are the impacts on the creative process? I'm tending to think of the negatives here, sorry, rather than the positives (if there are indeed any!) and, in this instance, poor decision making (meeting deadlines), burn-out (constant pressure), redundancy (threat of) etc come to mind! A follow-on question would be "How can these 'all-around-us' pressures be minimalised for the benefit of greater creativity / greater productivity" - read the book?
Dear BobF, Complex question ... shall we arrange a conversation? If you're happy to speak, feel free to contact me: m.petre@open.ac.uk. If not, I'll try to distill the key observations of what has worked in practice over the next couple of days and post something brief here (since the long version isn't likely to fit in this format).
Sounds good. Expect an email from me to kick-off within 24-48 hours, once I have distilled my questions even further. What do they say ... "Life's complicated"! Re: 'Ways Experts Think' - Personally, I think this is primarily innate i.e. personal characteristics although many will try to emulate with some success, some failures! PS: I would probably fall under the latter category although 'who knows' ;<)
This is a good high level talk about techniques engineers can use to get unstuck in design and debugging. I want a poster of the different ideas Marian talks about for when I need a different methodology to encourage creativity in my team.
Elecia, Thanks for this. I'll see about a poster ... In the meantime, some teams use the book ('Software Design Decoded') as a prompt; for example, they pick a page a random, or post a page per day.
Thank you for a very interesting talk.