The Human Factor in Software Engineering

The only place where the content of a presentation is more important than form are scientific conferences. There, the study presented and the results achieved are discussed. I believe that this is because the audience

1. is competent enough to understand the presentation´s content,
2. is interested in the content,
3. has clear criteria for judging scientific studies,
4. and has a lot of experience in listening and judging.

The audience of most other presentations lacks one or several of these competences. Maybe, this is the reason why most questionnaires asking participants of trainings and audience of presentations contain more questions about the form of presentation than about the content. For instance, I like the question: "The lecturer appears to be competent". It is correct to ask it this way because if the students could judge whether I am competent and teach them the most relevant content, they could give the lecture themselves.

However, I see a clear trend towards a general social development, even within science to be more interested in a presentation´s form than the content. I think that several trends lead in this direction:

• Life, science, technology etc. become more and more complex and it is difficult to keep up with the development. Therefore, it can happen that you do not understand each presentation´s content. But you can still judge the speaker according to criteria like voice, body language, which are so general that you can even apply them to a presentation given in a language you do not speak at all or to a presentation which you followed only five minutes, because the rest of the time you spent writing e-mails. So, judging the way of presentation can superbly hide that you did not follow the presentation mentally.
• In order to become a good speaker yourself, you have visited several speaker courses. They were hard. Every muscle of your body was criticized and you must control yourself completely. Like this, you learn to observe. And as people are critical with you, you are also critical with others. Hey, they are so much worse than you, because they evidently have spent less time in presentation courses than you did! They even do not know the basics.
• According to two studies cited by almost everyone, it is scientifically proven that audience judges a presentation by form and only to a very small fraction by content. I would be very interested in reading the original study, but the references are never given. It is possible that this research result has some threats to validity. Nevertheless, these claims influence people´s behaviour. Of course, they imitate the study´s participants because they receive the message that if everyone does this, it must be natural and good. Even if the purpose of presenting these studies is always so evident. It is either the motivational slide of a seminar about presentation techniques or a sales presentation for such a seminar. Well, as meanwhile these studies are so well-known, we can be sure that in replicating the study, we will find similar results. But in the good old times, I listened to a lot of really bad presentations, and we never said more than one sentence about it. We were really interested in the content, and as long as the presentation style did not keep us from understanding (even that happened), it was OK. Scientists did not need to be actors in these days. Meanwhile, there is a complete industry of people who earn their living by embellishing presentation slides, turning videos for presentations, consulting about the ideal style of clothing, hair-dress and make-up, and coaching presenters for hours for a 20-minutes-presentation.
• In literature, it is said that the fiercest book reviews stem from unsuccessful authors. This means, too, that the more critically and nastily the form of presentations is judged by the audience, the more critical become those who have been criticized severely themselves. This can lead to a vicious circle where the atmosphere in presentations becomes more and more aggressive. Nothing less than a perfect presentation is accepted. People not able to give perfect speeches are not allowed to talk. And not elected president anyway.

The problem about this development is that the discussion about a presentation´s form distracts from the content. With every year, I must spend more care on colours, forms, font types, multimedia, entertainment, didactics and body language. Next week, I will attend to a theatre course. I know from my
presentation and course evaluations that my competences as an actress are not sufficient. As a lecturer, I must take an actor training to authentically simulate the passion that I really feel. The audience does not perceive real passion (any more!). They are used to the exaggeration which is so typical for the stage. Of course, the theatre training costs a lot of time which I then can not spend for preparing content. But the audience is demanding for actors on the stages of science and seminars.

I would wish that we concentrate more on content, even in the days of multimedia. I do. Because my passion for knowledge is still stronger than my passion for colourful empty boxes.

Each time, when I am new at a university, I ask a lot of questions. Those who know only this one university immediately believe that I have never before given a lecture. Otherwise, I would know how a lecture and its exams are organized. But I tell you: The universities are all different, just as their restaurants are...

I just learned that at the university where I teach for the first time this summer, I must bring my own VGA cable with me. Hey, this is new! Is a VGA cable a normal teaching equipment? To bring along my laptop is standard. At one university, we had to bring our own remote control for the beamer, something that I did not know before. Here, it is the VGA cable. OK, this costs 1€ at Ebay. I hope that it will arrive here before the first lecture, otherwise I must improvise. Well, at least, I was told so. It might also happen that they forget to say something so self-evident.

I would say that software projects fail for the same reasons why all the rest fails, too. People are badly organized and overwhelmed by the number of e-mails coming in, the amount of work distributed to them and all other requirements.
Instead of organizing better and working harder, people survive by "setting their own priorities" and "thinking positive and not allowing others to put pressure on them". With the result that e-mails are not answered and people do not even feel guilty for not answering. They have lots of excuses like "the header did not say it is important" or "if an e-mail is not announced by a phone call, I consider it to be not important". Many tasks distributed on people are not done, endangering the success of a complete team´s project. Here, again, a lot of strange excuses are acceptable like "I was told only once. So, I could not know that my results are really needed" or "I saw that you all work a lot, so I thought that someone of you might have done it already".
Anyway, stress is an excuse always acceptable. And who of us has no stress?
Well, OK, back to work. I have a deadline today.

Recently: Someone said: "Programmers are not able to say one complete sentence."
Our reactions:
"Sure?"
"Can´t be true!"

Do students really need encouragement? Having travelled all five continents before they are 25, speaking 3 languages fluently thanks to longer stays abroad, being more competent than their university professors... Do they need encouragement?

I asked myself this question twice this evening. First, this was when I listened to another of these talks which encourage young students to be self-assurant, to say what they want and to demand their right on success, wealth and career. Is this useful? Is it really the thing that is most important for making a career? I can not remember that any of my bosses liked to hear the slightest hint that I want a training or to do less overwork or anything. When I was a nice girl, I was allowed to buy a book. At each of my jobs, I was asked to be modest. I was told that all my previous job experience was to be considered as null, because it is not relevant in this company or this university. Because here, everything is completely different than in the rest of the world. A clear clue on what hierarchical position I am expected to take, being a woman or being new or being shy or whatever.

After the well-meant encouraging presentation, we had a sponsored dinner. One of the students asked me what I have studied. Everyone asks me what and where I have studied and they want to talk with me about this. Well, boring topic. That was 20 years ago! Why don´t you ask me in which kindergarden I was? So, I told her even what I did after studies. Well, evidently, she does not like my CV. She told her fellow-student how a good CV must look - not like mine. What I wish her is that in 20 years she will think about me and about what she said. And she will wish that she would have been as successful as I have been. Right now, she seems to believe all this encouraging nonsense that in life you can decide which job you want and then you get it. Of course, you will never get to a dead end and never need to give up any dream. If you think positive... Uarg!

Do they really need encouragement? Or maybe, they rather need stories about hard work and evil, too. When my students enter the work life, they are less naive. They are warned.

In seinem sehr gut besuchten Vortrag (33 Teilnehmer) gab uns Dr. Merath nicht nur eine umfangreiche Einführung in die IT-Sicherheit, Datenschutz und IT-Recht, sondern diskutierte auch, dass diese Themen einerseits zwar komplex sind, andererseits aber auch wirksam, effizient und nutzbringend umgesetzt werden können.

Komplexität entsteht durch eine Vielzahl an Gesetzen, die gleichzeitig gelten, durch die Realitätsferne von Gesetzen und Auditoren, durch Nachweispflichten, dem Widerspruch zwischen Vertraulichkeit und Verfügbarkeit, Schlampigkeit von Mitarbeitern und der gesamten Organisation im Arbeitsalltag, Blindheit durch Erfahrung. Als Folge dieser Komplexität werden ständig Gesetze gebrochen.

Wichtig ist für die Praxis:
1.) frühzeitig beginnen: Vorbeugen, statt abwarten, bis etwas passiert!
2.) An alles denken, gründlich arbeiten. Entspannt das Richtige tun, das Unwichtige bleiben lassen.
3.) Sicherheit ist ein ständiger Prozess, keine einmalige Aktivität. Wenn man konsequent vorgeht, bekommt man die Komplexität allmählich in den Griff. Hier ist jeder Mitarbeiter gefragt. Alle müssen täglich an IT-Sicherheit und Datenschutz denken.

Die Vorteile, die man davon hat, liegen nicht nur in der erhöhten Sicherheit und der Einhaltung von Gesetzen. Man baut damit auch Vertrauen auf, auch und gerade bei den eigenen Mitarbeitern. Ein Drittel aller Meldungen von Gesetzesbrüchen stammen von Administratoren, also von Whistleblowern, die die Verantwortung für die organisationelle Schlampigkeit ihres Arbeitgebers nicht mehr tragen wollten. Die Gesetze sind nicht nur eine Pflicht, sondern helfen einer Firma dabei, moralische Werte umzusetzen.

Do Science Fiction books predict future technical developments or does technical development imitate novels? Anyway, the TV set which observes people is now true: read here (in German). I think that this was an unnecessary development as we are already sufficiently observed by our computers and by the Internet. But, of course, if you want to observe older people, you must get into their living rooms and watch them on TV. Well, I have no TV anyway. Having no TV is an important measure of my efficient time management.

OK, here I am, back from a sleepless night. It took me 8 hours for data recovery. The problem was not to recover the 10 files worth 20 work hours, that was done in half an hour. The problem is rather that while the laptop is in repair (or while I buy a new one) I must work on the other computer. So, I needed the backup from last december copied to it. And that took 7.5 hours!

My trouble was a mixture of partly unreadable CDs which hang up during copying and Windows Explorer moodiness. Finally I had to copy many folders file by file because the folder could not be copied as such. Some files made trouble and therefore, I combined backups from different sources. I hope that my tired eyes did not miss any important file.

As I had completely restructured my folder structure and deleted unnecessary files before the backup last december, the CD showed me the new structure, new folder name and how many files were left after cleanup. When a folder could not be copied, then I took an older backup, searched for the old folder name in the old structure to copy it. Uarg! This MUST happen exactly after such a cleanup. Otherwise, it would have been easy to do the recovery! Of course, the files which I deleted last year, are now back into the folders, hours of work are lost.

At least, I became much faster when I understood the pattern: sub-folders are not copied from the CD with a 95% probability. So, copying sub-folders one by one I could save a lot of time. The main time sink was not the manual effort, but the waiting times when I had to tear out the CD and re-insert it and waiting until the computer understood that there is a CD in the drive. Or the waiting times when restarting Windows Explorer. :-(

I could not even listen to an audio book in parallel. I did not want to heat up the old laptop too much, but the CD drive of the new one was busy...

Best of all: CD no. 3 made me really sweat! Its second copy was unreadable all together. It was not even recognized as a CD. And copy no. 1 degraded by and by, due to the excessive data copying. Finally, I spent 20 minutes putting it in the drive again and again, to have it finally read. However, one newer folder was lost. I had to get it from the broken laptop. :-((

The worst thing is that I must consider my backup from last december as practically non-existent. The files were partly not readable and it was impossible to copy sub-folders. I lost both copies of CD no. 3. I must repeat the backup with another storage medium.

OK, and now I go and see my friendly hardware guys from the shop around the corner... When I researched their opening times last night, my main sorrow was that they open so late. Now, it rather is that they close so early!