The Human Factor in Software Engineering

Theresa A. Steinbach and Linda V. Knight in their article "The Relevance of Information Systems Research: Informing the IS Practitioner Community; Informing Ourselves" discuss how software engineering research can become more relevant for practice. Several measures can contribute to this:
- develop closer relationships with practitioners (e.g. by research funding by industry)
- doing more relevant research (by topics and methods of higher relevance)
- changing faculty evaluation
- better dissemination

During my researcher time I often had discussions with others, because for them it seemed natural that each research institute - like each consulting company - needs to develop its own methods and never use those of others.
It is only since I am senior enough that I could choose as research topic rather fundamental questions which I investigate by empirical research, like "Which properties must a good method have?" or "Why is this software activity so difficult to perform?"
After my experiment series about risk estimation, I am currently gathering literature about complexity and will probably come up with the idea for a new experiment series about complexity reduction in software engineering soon. I think that this is rather what practitioners will help in their work, not the requirements engineering method number 215.

Just some few thoughts about the difference of the time management of a manager and of someone who does “real work”. You know what I want to say… In my work life, I have had both types of jobs, alternatingly. The really hard jobs are those where I am a manager and am expected to do real work. Because this in practice means that I am a manager as long as the sun shines and I am a worker during the night and week-ends. Without kidding!

The Manager
The manager is someone who is doing his work by communicating: listening to presentations, giving presentations, talking on the phone, reading and writing emails, publications, meeting protocols and press releases. His days are fully booked by several weeks in advance. One meeting follows the other and between the meetings does 5 minute tasks.
Such 5 minute tasks are phone calls, organizing something, reading or throwing away unread journals and emails, planning trips and sticking train tickets on paper.
This rhythm of work makes his time planning very predictable. His secretary always knows where he is and when he will be busy and when he can be called by phone.
Top managers even manage to be at two places the same time, i.e. they book several meetings for the same time and then just skip or two – or all of them, if something even more urgent pops up.
In fact, a manager´s stress is born by the fact that there is always more information crying for his attention then a human brain can take up, and there are always more meetings than he can attent.
Therefore, he needs a clear strategy and vision which helps him to decide what is important and what is less important.
But the good news is that many meetings can take place without him and he can do his job without having read all emails and all publications thrown onto him. Often, it is even not so important
whether he managed to bring all projects to fly because not starting a project is less a problem than not finishing a project.
Managers always are in hectic and must be well-organized, especially take good notes. As they do not work deeply in any project but instead supervise many of them, they easily get confused, start mixing up different projects and forget what they said yesterday, because they say so much. When I am a manager, I have 5-10 meetings/ phone calls a day and write 30-50 emails per day.
When a manager must do “real work” like reading a longer text or writing something or programming something (some managers do), he must sit on it late in the night because during the day´s hectic, between all these meetings and with the phone ringing frequently, he can not concentrate on anything for longer than 10 minutes.
Among the managers, there are not only those with a manager´s job title, but also secretaries, teachers, call center agents, doctors and hospital personnel, and many more.



Those who do the “real” work
Not everyone can organize and manage things, talk and listen. Some people must also do real work like writing text, programming software, building houses, baking break and all these basic activities where you must sit or and for a while and concentrate on something for a longer time. They all produce something and the more hours they work, the more they concentrate, the more the produce.
Often, they need some time until they have prepared the tools for their work and at the end of the work, they must clean tools, wash their hands, range material, park the tractor.
Many productive activities make no sense when you have only 20 minutes for them, especially complex knowledge work where you need 20 minutes until your brain is fully prepared for the task.
While some of the productive work can be boring, it is also relaxing and when you have routine, you can listen to music or feel the famous flow in your brain, you can become faster or better or try different variants of something. You become calm and beautiful results leave your hand like magic.
Meetings, phone calls, any disturbance keeps you not only from working and producing, but it also interrups your flow. Usually, the worker´s usefulness is measured by the number of products he produces, sometimes also by their quality. Therefore, these persons must be able to work under high concentration as long as they wish, without being disturbed.
When they work on innovative tasks, things always take 2-4 times as long as expected, and this can even happen for tasks which they have done before.
Often, there is a deadline until which things must be finished, and this is what causes the stress. The worked, too, always has more to do than he can do during your work day, but unlike the manager, no tricks are possible. Maybe, he can skip a meeting, but he can not skip or delegate his work. He must do it. He needs a clear strategy what to do in this case. Working more hours? Delivering late? Doing sloppy work and like this save time?
It is also an art to apportion large blocks of work on a longer period of time, like a marathon runner must apportion his forces.
Because of these differences between manager and worker, it makes not much sense when managers gives hints on good time management to their staff, because what works for the manager does not work for those who do the productive work.

As I love lists and statistics, I have counted how many books and articles I have read since 2004 about software engineering. They are 252 books and 2761 articles. :-)
Not counted are novels.

Each half-year, I write 2000 emails. This makes 20 per work day. Isn´t this crazy? No, I am no call center agent, I am a knowledge worker. Team work creates such an amount of communication. I apply some Best Practices for reducing the amount of emails written:
- ask less questions: Sometimes, it is attractive to just ask a stupid question in order to get the email and topic out of my mail box and send the ball of action to someone else. Until he answers my stupid question, I do not need to do anything about this topic. But, of course, the ball will return in the form of an answer. And this will force me to act anyway. Why not spare the world useless questions and just decide myself? Many people are not so fond on answering questions and making decisions, so my stupid question just creates work and stress on the other side.
- clear responsibilities: Sometimes, you do not mind who out of three persons answers your question. All you need is an answer. The problem is that the more people you send the question to, the less they will feel responsible for answering. Why me? Someone else will answer... If you want to triple the probability that you get an answer, then you must write to three persons individually, not by the same email.
- Tracking: 50% of all questions and tasks I send out by email go to the abyss. Some people´s inboxes are black holes where messages disappear. So, you can not trust that if you have asked a question, that you get an answer. Therefore, I track when I sent which question where and do not hesitate to repeat my email two weeks later. It is even better to contact the other on another medium like phone or just popping in his office or being in the kitchen at the same time.
- do not talk about others: If you have something to say to or about someone, do not create complex forward chains. When Alice asks you who has the book about X, and you believe that it is Bob, then do not do this: ask Bob, wait for his reply to forward it to Alice. Instead, tell Bob that Alice wants to know it, send Bob her email address and tell him to answer to her directly.
- answer emails within 24 hours: In one company where I worked, we had the order to answer each email within 24 hours. Such an answer can also be an out-of-office reply or the information that I will answer next week because I am currently on a training or because I must ask Bob and he is on vacation.
- keep promises: When you do not keep to the promises you made, you need not wonder that you get avoidable emails - in the worst case going to your boss per cc. (No good style, but more painful for you than for its author.)
- no preliminary information: Do not send intermediate versions of documents or preliminary information, except for very rare cases where someone is very eager on receiving information fast, even if it is preliminary. Do not send a new version of the same document every 6 hours to everyone. Because then, people will not read any of them, they just can not distinguish between main releases and mini changes.

In my former research, I showed that goal-oriented self-management leads to detrimental side-effects. Now, I work in a company that practices goal-oriented management. Recently, I experienced one of these side-effects. One of my objectives is to submit a certain number of research proposals this year. Now, I have a research idea that is not much more than an idea and a draft, we do not even have testbed partners for the evaluation of our idea. And the research partner will be on vacation the next two weeks. The deadline for the submission is 15th October. So, what alternatives do I have?
(a) To write the proposal all alone, what would have been feasible, as I write fast. But the consortium would be not very convincing and they would probably also not be convinced of what I wrote because they had no occasion for contributing their visions. Consequently, the probability of success would be low. I expect that the project either would not be funded or it would be funded but would shipwreck. However, I would have added one point to my proposal count.
(b) There will be another deadline for this programme next spring, so we can now take our time to discuss and find the right partners, and then submit half a year later. The idea is great, and we will probably be successful then in all respects. This is better for the company, but I will personally pay for having taken this decision. I will earn less money because of this.

A system that forces me to pay with my own salary for taking decisions that lead to a better success of my company, that is quite perverse. I believe that work life is such a complex system that conditions or criteria for success can not be expressed by a handful of key performance indicators (KPI). Such criteria indeed steer decisions, but this can go in the wrong direction, as in the example above. And I could tell more of these.

Of course, one could argue that I must have failed earlier, if two weeks before the deadline I realize that there is a problem. Well, I saw the problems approaching long time ago, but it was not in my hand to organize the consortium. There were several delays NOT caused by me; I did even worked on free days when it was my turn. That´s one unjust factor in this objective: The number of submitted research proposals does not depend on me alone, it is teamwork.

PS: The publication which I wrote about the effect of KPI is in German, see: Herrmann A (2009) Wie KPIs auf Entscheidungen wirken: ein explorativer Selbstversuch im Zeitmanagement. Metrikon 2009, Kaiserslautern, Germany

My name is Andrea Herrmann. My exciting and adventurous work life has led me through many jungles and over many seas. For 7 years, I was sweating as a consultant and project manager in software and consulting projects. The other 9 years, I have been working as a scientist and in University teaching. I am now a private lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. Next semester, I´ll teach Project Management again. I am still doing some private research. My main job (this means: the one that pays my living) is at a company where I am the Research and Innovation Manager. Yes, it IS exciting. I am creative one hour a day and the rest of the day is real work, like writing consortium agreements or project reports. I am writing a lot anyway. Currently, my book about communication is growing, and there are also some nice little novels around. And now the blog.

Dies ist also mein Blog zum Faktor Mensch in der Software-Entwicklung. Das ist ein ganz guter Obertitel für meine Lieblings-Themen wie (ir)rationale Entscheidungen, Requirements Engineering, leichtgewichtiges Projektmanagement, Zeitmanagement, Kreativität, Sicherheit und Qualität sowie emipirische Forschung. In diesem Blog sammle ich die besten Fundstücke aus meinen Literaturrecherchen sowie eigene Forschungsergebnisse und Gedanken.

This is now my blog about Human Factors in Software Engineering. This is a suitable sup-title for my favourite topics like (ir)rational decision-making, requirements engineering, light-weight project management, time management, creativity, security and quality as well as empirical research. In this blog, I gather the best nuggets from my literature research, own research results and thoughts.