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@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ There are other roles you might be thinking of that I haven't mentioned:
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Every decision made in a software team is under uncertainty, and so another important concept in organizations is *risk*<boehm91>. 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. Of course, as many popular outlets on software engineering have begun to discover, when software fails, it usually "did exactly what it was told to do. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing.<somers17>
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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|https://mozilla.org] have revenue, buildings, and a CEO, and while they don't sell anything, they do market. Others like Linux<lee03> rely heavily on contributions both from volunteers<ye03>, 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. In fact, recent work empirically uncovered 9 reasons why modern open source projects fail: 1) lost to competition, 2) made obsolete by technology advances, 3) lack of time to volunteer, 4) lack of interest by contributors, 5) outdated technologies, 6) poor maintainability, 7) interpersonal conflicts amongst developers, 8) legal challenges, 9) and acquisition<coelho17>. Another study showed that funding open source projects often requires substantial donations from large corporations; most projects don't ask for donations, and those that do receive very little, unless well-established, and most of those funds go to paying for basic expenses such as engineering salaries<overney20>. Those aren't too different from traditional software organizations, aside from the added challenges of sustaining a volunteer workforce.
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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|https://mozilla.org] have revenue, buildings, and a CEO, and while they don't sell anything, they do market. Others like Linux<lee03> rely heavily on contributions both from volunteers<ye03>, 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. In fact, recent work empirically uncovered 9 reasons why modern open source projects fail: 1) lost to competition, 2) made obsolete by technology advances, 3) lack of time to volunteer, 4) lack of interest by contributors, 5) outdated technologies, 6) poor maintainability, 7) interpersonal conflicts amongst developers, 8) legal challenges, and 9) acquisition<coelho17>. Another study showed that funding open source projects often requires substantial donations from large corporations; most projects don't ask for donations, and those that do receive very little, unless well-established, and most of those funds go to paying for basic expenses such as engineering salaries<overney20>. Those aren't too different from traditional software organizations, aside from the added challenges of sustaining a volunteer workforce.
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All of the above has some important implications for what it means to be a software engineer:
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@ -37,4 +37,4 @@ All of the above has some important implications for what it means to be a softw
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* Engineers have to work with _a lot_ of people working with different roles. Learning what those roles are and what shapes their success is important to being a good collaborator<li17>.
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* While engineers might have many great ideas for product, if they really want to shape what they're building, they should be in a product role, not an engineering role.
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All that said, without engineers, products wouldn't exist. They ensure that every detail about a product reflects the best knowledge of the people in their organization, and so attention to detail is paramount. In future chapters, we'll discuss all of the ways that software engineers manage this detail, mitigating the burden on their memories with tools and processes.
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All that said, without engineers, products wouldn't exist. They ensure that every detail about a product reflects the best knowledge of the people in their organization, and so attention to detail is paramount. In future chapters, we'll discuss all of the ways that software engineers manage this detail, mitigating the burden on their memories with tools and processes.
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