Essay - Net Culture and System Design and Development

From SoftwarePractice.org

Net Culture and System Design and Development

Thesis: Exploration of the internet and the widespread adaptation of technology and how it is affecting the way new software engineers develop technology.

Note that this should be in no-way regarded as an professional, completely authoriative source (as I'm not a sociologist), but merely the grouping of observations from one student's view followed by an opinion on how we can improve or harness these trends.

It will explore:

• Teamwork
• Immersion Learning
• Changes in culture and how people interact
• The contrast of formal software engineering to the type of developments that often occur on the internet.

Introduction:

The word 'revolution' does not do justice to the creation and spreading of the Internet, which has had technological, cultural, social, legal, economic impact and change, infiltrating every element of our lives. However discussed will be only one segment of the users and their goals, software developers and engineers (though this does span across technological, cultural and social ideas), to explore how it has changed how they do their jobs now.

Because of this rapid change in the capability and role of technology in our lives, software engineers are burdened with new responsibilities but are also given greater freedom in how they can accomplish their tasks. The enhancements include teamwork and greater learning, and burdens include having to understand and work with this new techno-culture, from changes in users to changes in work colleagues.

All this brings forth the question, are the software engineers properly taking advantage of this new way of completing their tasks, or is there still more properties of this new technology that we do not understand or utilize properly?

TEAMWORK

• Technologies include email, IM, Video Conferencing for communication, and lead up to CVS, Subversion systems that help distributed development.
• Teamwork covers both the developers, clients and the users, and how they interact, gather information for requirements, etc.
• This will lead into either the changes in culture or the look at formal vs. informal, macro vs. micro development styles.

FORMAL VS INFORMAL

• Web projects are rarely the large systems that professional software engineers help design and build, typically they are small programs, widgets, marco's etc. that are built to do one thing.
• Feature creep however can mangle this.
• While alot are developers in real life this does not mean they have had a formal education.
• Net development can be seen as the micro-development period, where a few modules are coded and put together ot accomplish this one function, rarely planned and ad-hoc, the code till it works method is usually used. (OOP style often)
• This can be contrasted to formal systems development that we have experienced in OOD and will experience in software architecture engineering and other subjects later in our degrees.
• These projects and the net are regularly a place where a new developer will search for hints and tips and is why we should try and encourage new standards to push towards, to raise the quality worldwide.

CHANGES IN CULTURE

• The average user is becoming more and more technically minded and able.
• Immersion learning is part of this.
• There is a definite coding culture that the professional software engineers should harness (and this is not unreasonable as alot are deeply involved with this).
• Less technofear in the manner that we understand that the technical systems are more able etc, however more technofear as the increased responsibility means that we need to be more careful about how good our coding and design is.
• Changes in how clients and users interact with developers, communicate ideas and concepts (including standards and methodoligies UML for instance)