The photo above is candid shot of some of the software engineers of AnswerDash, a company I co-founded in 2012. There are a few things to notice. First, you see one of the employees explaining something, while others are diligently working off to the side. It's not a huge team; just a few engineers, plus several employees in other parts of the organization in another room. This, as simple as it looks, is pretty much what all software engineering work looks like. Some organizations have one of these teams; others have thousands.
+The photo above is a candid shot of some of the software engineers of AnswerDash, a company I co-founded in 2012. There are a few things to notice. First, you see one of the employees explaining something, while others are diligently working off to the side. It's not a huge team; just a few engineers, plus several employees in other parts of the organization in another room. This, as simple as it looks, is pretty much what all software engineering work looks like. Some organizations have one of these teams; others have thousands.
What you can't see is just how much complexity underlies this work. You can't see the organizational structures that exist to manage this complexity. Inside this room and the rooms around it were processes, standards, reviews, workflows, managers, values, culture, decision making, analytics, marketing, sales. And at the center of it were people executing all of these things as well as they could to achieve the organization's goal.
Organizations are a much bigger topic than I could possibly address here. To deeply understand them, you'd need to learn about organizational studies, organizational behavior, information systems, and business in general.
-The subset of this knowledge that's critical to understand about software engineering is limited to a few important concepts. The first and most important concept is that even in software organizations, the point of the company is rarely to make software; it's to provide value (Osterwalder et al. 2015). Software is sometimes the central means to providing that value, but more often than not, it's the information flowing through that software that's the truly valuable piece. Requirements, which will discuss in more detail soon, help engineers organize how software will provide value.
+The subset of this knowledge that's critical to understand about software engineering is limited to a few important concepts. The first and most important concept is that even in software organizations, the point of the company is rarely to make software; it's to provide value (Osterwalder et al. 2015). Software is sometimes the central means to providing that value, but more often than not, it's the information flowing through that software that's the truly valuable piece. Requirements, which will be discussed in more detail soon, help engineers organize how software will provide value.
The individuals in a software organization take on different roles to achieve that value. These roles are sometimes spread across different people and sometimes bundled up into one person, depending on how the organization is structured, but the roles are always there. Let's go through each one in detail so you understand how software engineers relate to each role. @@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
Every decision made in a software team is under uncertainty, and so another important concept in organizations is risk (Boehm 1991). It's rarely possible to predict the future, and so organizations must take risks. Much of an organization's function is to mitigate the consequences of risks. Data scientists and researchers mitigate risk by increasing confidence in an organization's understanding of the market and it's consumers. Engineers manage risk by trying to avoid defects and moving fast.
+Every decision made in a software team is under uncertainty, and so another important concept in organizations is risk (Boehm 1991). It's rarely possible to predict the future, and so organizations must take risks. Much of an organization's function is to mitigate the consequences of risks. Data scientists and researchers mitigate risk by increasing confidence in an organization's understanding of the market and its consumers. Engineers manage risk by trying to avoid defects and moving fast.
Open source communities are organizations too. The core activities of design, engineering, and support still exist in these, but how much a community is engaged in marketing and sales depends entirely on the purpose of the community. Big, established open source projects like Mozilla have revenue, buildings, and a CEO, and while they don't sell anything, they do market. Others like Linux (Lee & Cole 2013) rely heavily on contributions both from volunteers (Ye & Kishida 2003), but also paid employees from companies that depend on Linux, like IBM, Google, and others. In these settings, there are still all of the challenges that come with software engineering, but fewer of the constraints that come from a for-profit or non-profit motive.