Most of what I read in software engineering textbooks, magazine articles, and blogs seems to assume large teams of developers working on sprawling projects for giant organisations like Microsoft, Google or the Apache Foundation. Nearly all of my own software development experience, however, has been in teams of one or two developers working on research…
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In response to the Australian Government’s proposal to force search and social media companies to negotiate payment with news publishers, Google threatened to leave the country and Facebook decided to remove news content from its service. The latter decision in particular left a lot of organisations scrambling for what to do. An enormous body of…
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“Social distancing” responses to COVID-19 have ordered people to work from home wherever possible. No doubt this includes many software developers, who might ordinarily be conducting daily stand-up meetings and other forms of face-to-face communication called for by modern software development processes. Obviously the stand-up meeting could be replaced by a videoconference, say, and tools…
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I’m an academic and a software developer. Studies of software developers suggest that practising developers typically refer to peers, books, blogs, and other social media rather than academic research when looking to solve problems (Beecham et al, 2014; Petersen et al, 2014). My own experience of software development tells me that the former sorts of…
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