Robert Smallshire is a founding director of Sixty North, a technology product and consulting business in Norway providing services throughout Europe. Robert has worked in senior software architecture and technical management roles in the energy sector, and is currently embarking on a new Internet-of-Things venture for solar power prediction and monitoring. He has dealt with understanding, designing, advocating and implementing effective architectures for sophisticated scientific, enterprise and embedded software in Python, C++ and the .NET stack. He holds a Ph.D. in a natural science.
It's awkward to perform scientific experiments on developers, so let's simulate them instead! The emerging field of software process dynamics applies systems thinking and simulated experiments of software development teams and the systems they build, to inform decisions on projects, process and architecture.
In 1968 Melvin Conway pointed out a seemingly inevitable symmetry between organisations and the software systems they construct. Organisations today are more fluid than 40 years ago, with short developer tenure, and frequent migration of individuals between projects and employers. In this slot we’ll examine – and perhaps collect – data on the tenure and productivity of programmers and use this to gain insight into codebases, by simulating their growth with simple stochastic models. From such models, we can make important predictions about the maintainability and long-term viability of software systems, with implications for how we approach software design, documentation, and how we assemble teams.
