Software. Well… It's Complicated [Webinar Thread]

[Shmuel Gershon]

Thanks for joining the webinar today!!

As a way to assist you into taking full advantage of it, here goes an introspective question related to what we talked during the presentation. It will be great if we can have an ongoing conversation on how different people and contexts deal with different difficulties!

Try to compare different software systems you have worked with.
Can you identify which of the complexities of that system were inherent to it having a Software entity? Which of the complexities were incidental due to organization or design decisions?
Could this distinction have helped (or can it help now) you to have better testing conversations? How?

🙂
Shmuel

View Webinar & Slides Here

[Isabel]

Hi Shmuel
thanks for the webinar – interesting.
It struck me that the points about software also apply to people, so maybe an aspect of the complexity of software projects is the interaction between complex people (the soft machines) and complex software. A human is also a system where the workings of the system are complex, changeable and invisible to other humans…So I would reflect that complexity incidental to software may be inherent to the human aspects of a project, and vice versa…?

[Shmuel Gershon]

Isabel, thanks for the reply, glad you found it interesting. Your comment is interesting too!

Isabel wrote:

It struck me that the points about software also apply to people, so maybe an aspect of the complexity of software projects is the interaction between complex people (the soft machines) and complex software.
A human is also a system where the workings of the system are complex, changeable and invisible to other humans…So I would reflect that complexity incidental to software may be inherent to the human aspects of a project, and vice versa…?

Reading your comment I wish I (knew more about the human complexity side and then) had spent more time talking about this topic.
I guess as far as systems go, humans win on complexity score :).
We mentioned in the webinar that dealing with software we need to deal with the different way people imagine software (any representation is a lacking representation of that imagination) and each person is imagining it differently. Human aspects is a main trait of software that needs to be regarded when accepting/embracing the software complexity. Some humanity is embedded in any software. Dealing with this human aspects can help — if we can organize our communications better we reduce the amount this communications complexity and difficulty gets added to the natural complexity of software.

Thanks for the instructive comment!

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