The Human Factor in Software Engineering

This is cool: The last message from someone who left the internet long ago. I wonder whether he came back...

Here you find a website with studies and surveys about the perception and usage of new technologies.

"Don't study, teach yourself." This is the message of the edupunks movement. And my heart sais "yes" and "no" to this.

No: Before you start doing something new and creative, you should learn about what there is already. Problems, solutions, problems of the solutions, rules, alternative methods and tools. And only after you know this all, you can start developing your own solutions.

Learning the old stuff is more efficient when you trust an expert to summarize it for you and give you an overview about it. This is what your studies are for.

Yes: Of course, you are always responsible for yourself. The university can only deliver you part of the knowledge you will need for the rest of your life. This can not be otherwise because universities can only deliver basic knowledge which they believe will be useful for most of the students. When you were a professor, you would know what a small fraction of this expert`s knowledge fits into one lecture. It is frustrating for the professor, but he must make an educated choice. Especially, practical trainings and exercises take so much time. You can present UML in one hour, but really teaching it until everyone is a UML master would take several weeks of full-time teaching. And will all of them need it in this detail later-on?
So, the better you already know what job you want to do afterwards, the better you can teach yourself additionally what you will need and can focus during your studies on these topics, for instance by choosing the right lectures, seminars and internships.

I think that studies are a good basis for everything. You gather basic knowledge and learn working and learning strategies. And you get professional feedback about your performance, weaknesses and strengths. The professor has seen hundreds or thousands of students, he can compare.
But you will never stop learning anyway!

I understand that the demanding young generation who expects perfection from others, is not satisfied with their professors. I hope they will get more modest when they start working and see that they are not perfect neither and overestimated their knowledge and performance. When they start to see how much work it is to prepare a really good presentation and to give objective and competent feedback to 40 students.

My advice is: Go and trust the good old education system, but do not lay all responsibility on your professors. You are the one who knows where you want to go and what you want to learn. Set your own focus and teach yourself, too. And do not expect the professor to be responsible for your future. He has so many students!
And, by the way, it is the same for professionals: The boss and the company, they do not feel responsible for your learning and your future, neither. They are responsible for profit. So, they use you for producing profit. That`s it. Take the responsibility for your learning and future in your hands, too! This is the reason why I am able to earn my living now. While I was employed, I invested a lot of spare time and private money on learning. And now it is mainly these extra job activities that earn my bread and butter. Because in a company, you often learn to use very specific technologies not relevant elsewhere and follow company-specific work processes. Each company is a little universum on its own and knowledge from one universum might not be useful in the rest of the world. So, never stop learning!

Here two links:
http://www.edupunksguide.org/
And Ben, an active German blogger about anti-uni learning:
http://anti-uni.com/

And, of course, there are all these online course portals:
https://www.udemy.com
http://mooc.org/
https://www.coursepath.com/
http://www.akademie.de
http://www.lecturio.de/
http://www.edudip.com
http://www.diplomero.com
http://www.codecademy.com/
https://iversity.org/
http://www.udacity.com
http://www.coursera.org
http://www.ocwconsortium.org
http://www.codecademy.com
https://www.edx.org/
https://openhpi.de/
http://www.tele-task.de
https://www.open-c3s.de/
http://academy-cube.eu/
http://futurelearn.com
https://grockit.com/

Dear all, here you can find a test of virus scanners. They are all good, but not equally good. And some are more appropriate for some countries and some for others, as the risk profile (i.e. virus distribution) is not the same in all countries.

Oh, I like this article about the British intelligence agency who sais that they can manipulate online polls and automatically create postings in social networks. This explains how some online discussions develop! So, only trust in your own online lies!

Today, it became official: I am supporter of the IREB International Requirements Engineering Board. I am member of the working group writing the syllabus for the Advanced Level Certification in Requirements Management.

I know, this is a bit off-topic because it has nothing to do with software development. But I like this idea and want to share it: We are now doing research towards the zero waste society in Europe. I am looking forwards to this. I know, it will take a while until we reach perfection. But meanwhile, I am doing my share of recycling and bring back some batteries to where they get recycled.

I want to recommend this article about "Twenty Dumb Things Organizations Do to Mess Up Their Relationship With Employees". When reading through the list, I had to smile several times, because I could remember real-life stories from my own work life as an employee. Frequently, I thought that our motivation would have been higher if the boss simply had done nothing and said nothing. We were intrinsically motivated, but management activities destroyed this motivation. Being a freelancer, I now do not need to deal with this type of obstacle. I do not need to find out how to overcome demotivation caused by the boss or by bad team work. Customers are almost always motivating. The fact that they need my results is motivating. And work is fun anyway.

However,... The article makes clear claims, but things are not so simple. For instance, Susan M. Heathfield recommends to treat all employees equally, and in the same time to not do it. When single persons make errors, do not solve the problem by defining new rules for everyone. In the same time, this is how process improvement works. You see errors been made, make a root cause analysis and solve it. But of course, the root cause can also be that single persons need a training or supervision. So, you do not need to punish the whole team for errors made by single persons, but then you do not treat them equally. Some will have more freedom than others. When I was a boss, someone complained that I do not treat the whole team equally. My quick response was: "You do not treat me equally, neither!"

Anyway, the more experience I have, the more I think that life is too complex to solve problems with single rules. In each situation, a fitting decision is needed. Rules can help define alternative solutions, but then intuition comes into the game because you need to predict what will happen when you act so or so.

I am very excited about the hitchBOT experiment: A robot will hitchhike its way from Canada's east coast to the west coast. Will people accept hitchBOT as a hitchhiker? Help it reload its batteries in their cigarette lighters? Will they have interesting conversations with the robot? We can follow hitchBOT's trip in its blog here. You can read more about hitchBOT and see its photo here. The trip starts July 27th!