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Credit: Andrew J. Ko

Software organizations

Andrew J. Ko

The photo above is candid shot of some of the software engineers of AnswerDash, a company I co-founded in 2012. There are a few things to notice. First, you see one of the employees explaining something, while others are diligently working off to the side. It's not a huge team; just a few engineers, plus several employees in other parts of the organization in another room. This, as simple as it looks, is pretty much what all software engineering work looks like. Some organizations have one of these teams; others have thousands.

What you can't see is just how much complexity underlies this work. You can't see the organizational structures that exist to manage this complexity. Inside this room and the rooms around it were processes, standards, reviews, workflows, managers, values, culture, decision making, analytics, marketing, sales. And at the center of it were people executing all of these things as well as they could to achieve the organization's goal.

Organizations are a much bigger topic than I could possibly address here. To deeply understand them, you'd need to learn about organizational studies, organizational behavior, information systems, and business in general.

The subset of this knowledge that's critical to understand about software engineering is limited to a few important concepts. The first and most important concept is that even in software organizations, the point of the company is rarely to make software; it's to provide value (Osterwalder et al. 2015). Software is sometimes the central means to providing that value, but more often than not, it's the information flowing through that software that's the truly valuable piece. Requirements, which will discuss in more detail soon, help engineers organize how software will provide value.

The individuals in a software organization take on different roles to achieve that value. These roles are sometimes spread across different people and sometimes bundled up into one person, depending on how the organization is structured, but the roles are always there. Let's go through each one in detail so you understand how software engineers relate to each role.

As I noted above, sometimes the roles above get merged into individuals. When I was CTO at AnswerDash, I had software engineering roles, design roles, product roles, sales roles, and support roles. This was partly because it was a small company when I was there. As organizations grow, these roles tend to be divided into smaller pieces. This division often means that different parts of the organization don't share knowledge, even when it would be advantageous (Chilana 2011).

Note that in the division of responsibilities above, software engineers really aren't the designers by default. They don't decide what product is made or what problems that product solves. They may have opinions—and a great deal of power to enforce their opinions, as the people building the product—but it's not ultimately their decision.

There are other roles you might be thinking of that I haven't mentioned:

Every decision made in a software team is under uncertainty, and so another important concept in organizations is risk (Boehm 1991). It's rarely possible to predict the future, and so organizations must take risks. Much of an organization's function is to mitigate the consequences of risks. Data scientists and researchers mitigate risk by increasing confidence in an organization's understanding of the market and it's consumers. Engineers manage risk by trying to avoid defects and moving fast.

Open source communities are organizations too. The core activities of design, engineering, and support still exist in these, but how much a community is engaged in marketing and sales depends entirely on the purpose of the community. Big, established open source projects like Mozilla have revenue, buildings, and a CEO, and while they don't sell anything, they do market. Others like Linux (Lee & Cole 2013) rely heavily on contributions both from volunteers (Ye & Kishida 2003), but also paid employees from companies that depend on Linux, like IBM, Google, and others. In these settings, there are still all of the challenges that come with software engineering, but fewer of the constraints that come from a for-profit or non-profit motive.

All of the above has some important implications for what it means to be a software engineer:

All that said, without engineers, products wouldn't exist. They ensure that every detail about a product reflects the best knowledge of the people in their organization, and so attention to detail is paramount. In future chapters, we'll discuss all of the ways that software engineers manage this detail, mitigating the burden on their memories with tools and processes.

Next chapter: Communication

Further reading

Begel, A., & Zimmermann, T. (2014, May). Analyze this! 145 questions for data scientists in software engineering. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 12-23).

Boehm, B. W. (1991). Software risk management: principles and practices. IEEE software, 8(1), 32-41.

Chilana, P. K., Ko, A. J., Wobbrock, J. O., Grossman, T., & Fitzmaurice, G. (2011, May). Post-deployment usability: a survey of current practices. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2243-2246). ACM.

Clegg, S. and Bailey, J.R. (2008). International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies. Sage Publications.

Kalliamvakou, E., Bird, C., Zimmermann, T., Begel, A., DeLine, R., German, D. M. What Makes a Great Manager of Software Engineers? To appear in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. IEEE.

Ko, Andrew J. (2017). A Three-Year Participant Observation of Software Startup Software Evolution. International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering in Practice, to appear.

Lee, G. K., & Cole, R. E. (2003). From a firm-based to a community-based model of knowledge creation: The case of the Linux kernel development. Organization science, 14(6), 633-649.

Li, Paul, Ko, Andrew J., and Begel, Andrew (2017). Collaborating with Software Engineers: Perspectives from Non-Software Experts. In the Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering.

A. Osterwalder, Y. Pigneur, G. Bernarda, & A. Smith (2015). Value proposition design: how to create products and services customers want. John Wiley & Sons.

Yunwen Ye and Kouichi Kishida. 2003. Toward an understanding of the motivation Open Source Software developers. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '03). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 419-429.