The Human Factor in Software Engineering

Here a funny video about a phone conference in real: click here. That reminds me of something...

CreaRE 2015: Fifth International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering
https://sites.google.com/site/creare2015/
The workshop proceedings are available at:
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1342/

This Monday, March 23, CreaRE 2015 took place in Essen (Germany). Here, I give a short summary and experience report of the workshop:

• In his key note talk with the title "Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating!", Kim Lauenroth (adesso) started with general concepts of creativity and then discussed how much creativity there is in RE and whether the requirements engineer must be or is allowed to be creative. One could also take the position that the requirements engineer is only the "voice recorder" for the customer's voice. Only the customer is allowed to be creative, the requirements engineer simply puts the customers' ideas on paper. In any case: RE is the most creative activity in the whole software engineering process! Requirements build the bridge between problem and solution.
• Sebastian Adam and Marcus Trapp (Fraunhofer Instituts IESE) presented "Success Factors for Creativity Workshops in RE", looking back on 9 workshops they performed in industry settings for RE. The main message they repeat is that creativity workshops must be prepared and executed systematically. The creativity and flexibility is in the content, not in the process! To identify really innovative requirements, they say, mere brainstorming is not sufficient. Some of their success factors are: a set of creativity techniques which the moderators know very well, several roles (among them two moderators) for different tasks, two full days and continuous filtering and prioritization to keep the focus. What I liked to hear especially was that starting with negative ideas ("What must not happen?") is recommended, because this is the basic idea of MOQARE and my MOQARE experience shows this, too. People love catastrophies and horror stories. They make them creative!
• Jennifer Horkoff and Neil Maiden (City University London) under the title "Creativity and Conceptual Modeling for Requirements Engineering" present a new idea how to support the creative process with an online tool, which can maybe replace a professional workshop moderator. The approach is still in the conceptual phase, but I am looking forwards to the resulting tool and process. I, too, believe that creativity needs process support.
• In our interactive session, we distributed the roundabout 20 participants into 3 groups which each applied another creativity method to the same question: How can we improve an existing RE tool? Finally, these groups solved the following three tasks:
1. Using the morphological box, creative new ideas of tool support for RE were developed, in various unexpected combinations of features an RE tool already has.
2. Applying the Force Fit method which brings together what does not belong to each other, combined Facebook with requirements traceability. In fact, they found lots of similarities and applications, like defining friend relations between requirements and prioritizing requirements by liking them.
3. The 6 Thinking Hats group analysed Visio as an RE tool, and although emotions went in the direction of "I hate it", they identified many advantages of the tool, too. Comparing it with alternative tools, enhancement ideas arose and in the end there were two requirements which were thought worthwhile to be treated further in a subsequent RE workshop, one of them the online collaboration which so far is not supported by this tool.

Transparency International collects data about the dependencies of German Universities on industry financement: https://www.hochschulwatch.de/

I must say that I am not very worried when software engineering research is financed by companies. In these cases, the university serves as a temporary employment agency. It employs young academic personnel and lends them to enterprises. The financial profit is on both sides. The professor and University can prove that they work on topics which are relevant for practice, and that they can aquire funding. The enterprise gets a highly qualified programmer or consultant at half the prize they might pay for an employee. The doctoral "student" works in practice, instead of becoming an expert in some philosophical topic which will make people laugh when he tries to enter work-life after the doctoral thesis. There are only two disadvantages of these arrangements:

1. Basic research loses its value. As companies do not pay for research like "empirical research on cognitive load during programming" or so (topics which I find thrilling), this topic does not sell well in general. For instance, when one applies for a professorship.
2. The scientific value of a doctoral thesis written in a company might suffer from the need to do practical work like programming a software product. Of course, software engineering scientists at universities also develop software, but they most often support a scientifically developed method or help to evaluate some theory. While software developed by doctoral students at companies rather solve practical problems. Of course, they will use scientific research results, but do they also produce scientific knowledge? Of course, it is possible but maybe not the sponsor's first priority.

The problem of research financed by companies probably is worse in medicine, pharmacy or biology where research projects not only produce new products (which is not bad), but also evaluate their usefulness. If they are biased, the damage is higher. In software engineering research, a biased tool evaluation can not do much harm. But a biased evaluation of pesticides or medicine can be fatal.

Disclaimer: My current research is completely unfinanced and therefore independent of financially motivated influence. :-)

CreaRE 2015: Fifth International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering
https://sites.google.com/site/creare2015/

date: March 23, 2015
place: Essen (Germany)

*** Workshop Agenda ***
14:00-15:00 Kim Lauenroth: Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating! (Key Note)
15:00-15:30 Sebastian Adam and Marcus Trapp: Success Factors for Creativity Workshops in RE
16:00-16:30 Jennifer Horkoff and Neil Maiden: Creativity and Conceptual Modeling for Requirements Engineering
16:30-17:30 interactive session and discussion


*** Workshop topic, background and motivation ***
In the past five years, Requirements Engineering (RE) has been increasingly more recognized as creative activity. This is especially true in contexts of developing systems for application areas such as game design, crowdsourcing, assistive health-care, smart cities, and green computing. RE for those areas demands stakeholders to create visions of future software systems and to imagine all their implications. Creativity techniques that have been developed and used in other disciplines and areas of problem-solving, have the potential to be adapted and adopted in today’s RE, becoming the foundation for innovative RE processes addressing both problem analysis and solution design.

*** Goals of the workshop ***
The CreaRE series of workshops brings together RE practitioners and researches engaged in discussing the role of creativity in RE, the array of creativity techniques that can be applied to RE, and the ways in which creativity techniques from other disciplines can be leveraged in RE. Drawing upon the previous workshop editions, the intended purpose of the CREARE’15 workshop is to be a forum for the exchange of emerging ideas, experience and research results. It also aims at raising awareness in the RE community of the importance of creativity and creativity techniques.


*** CreaRE 2015 Program Committee ***
Sebastian Adam Fraunhofer Institut IESE, Germany
Dan Berry University of Waterloo, Canada
Thomas Herrmann Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany
Eric Knauss Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Anitha PC Siemens AG, Erlangen, Germany
Kurt Schneider Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
Roel Wieringa University of Twente, The Netherlands
Konstantinos Zachos City University London, UK

*** Workshop Organizers ***
Andrea Herrmann, Herrmann & Ehrlich, Germany
Maya Daneva, University of Twente The Netherlands
Joerg Doerr, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Anne Hoffmann, Siemens, Germany

I like this article about the job and salary structure in science: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang. In fact, this was the reason why after my PhD I left the scientific circus to find a stable employment with career paths and security.
However, then I found out what happens in a company when it is restructured. Or sold. Career paths disappear and when it comes to survival, then a family father's income is always more important than the income of the young woman who was employed a year ago.
So, I took a second jump into science and worked hard. During my PhD time, I just did my job, now I did much more than that. But the up-or-out-principle works without pity. And having worked in companies for 6.5 years was a large disadvantage.

OK, there is no use to cry about past times gone. I am now creating my own career path.

Recently, I read this motto, and I love it. Because when you invest time in a project, then you have believed in this project. And if it does not end as you expected, the idea probably still is as good as ever, but the form was not ideal. For instance, I have developed courses which I did not sell so far. One course became an e-learning course instead, another one will become a book soon. I still believe in the idea and do not want the idea and preparation to be lost. And finally: If the book sells great, people might want to experience the course in real, too. Anyway, I hate to dump 50-100 hours of work!

Here am I, back from winter lectures. I have been quite busy, giving lectures in three different towns! Recently, I restructured a course completely which I have held about ten times during the last three years. The last course evaluation was the last straw that broke the camel's back.

It was a well-designed course where each participant during these two days treated two out of six topics twice actively and consumed the rest twice by the presentations of their colleagues. So, if someone was with us mentally the whole time, (s)he was well prepared for the exam in the end. However, the students disliked the course. I was accused of being lazy and incompetent. This never happens to me in the other courses which are less interactive and less demanding. In fact, it is much easier for me to come with a powerpoint presentation and talk for two days through. There can be no surprises, no difficult questions, no discussions about why this student's solution is wrong or maybe not.

I can talk for days, and talk and talk and talk. But in the pedagogic course, we learned that we must not do this. We must make the course participants work. They must do exercise after exercise and discover the knowledge themselves.

Finally, it did not work. I will forget everything I learned in this course. The students want ex-cathedra teaching. It is less risky. When they do an exercise, they assume that it is wrong anyway. And if their colleagues present something, they, too, assume that it is wrong and not worth being listened. And when they come to a course, they do not expect to learn something there. They expect that they can write their emails there and plan for the exam preparation some days later.

So, in the completely revised version, I did my presentations most of the time and a very short case study exercise in addition, to have some change. That was completely OK and they liked listening to me and taking notes and all this school-like setting.

End of the story: I am back at ex-cathedra teaching. I do not know on which weak scientific basis trainers are taught to torture their participants by making them work. When the participants do the exercises, this is mainly out of mere politeness, not because they love it. Doing an exercise creates stress for them, like an exam. There is always the risk they do something wrong and loose their face in front of the whole group. Who loves this?

I do not completely give up hope to find some really genial, innovative trick for teaching. But for the moment, it is OK for me to stand and talk all day.

Mentoring usually means that a young person learns from someone with more experience. More experience means that there is more knowledge, and this knowledge can then flow to the person who has less.

Reverse mentoring, instead, works the other way round: The experienced person learns from the younger one. How is this possible? In German, we know the word "Betriebsblindheit" which can be translated as "routine-blinded". This means that experts have learned to see things in only one way. New, unexperienced persons see things differently. Of course, a new or different sight is not always better. But it might. And the discussion about why things are as they are, can be helpful to assure whether you really know what you are doing and whether it still makes sense, whether it makes sense in any case etc.

The term of reverse mentoring, however, is regularly used in cases where older people learn from younger about topics where the young persons really have more experience, for instance about new media.


Experiences from Lufthansa and T-Systems (in German): http://www.personalwirtschaft.de/media/Personalwirtschaft_neu_161209/Produktfamilie/Jahrbuch%20PE/Jahrbuch_2011_Beitrag_ReverseMentoring.pdf