Communications - July 2010

ineffective project planning can lead to an egregious amount of time where progress alone will not be enough to sustain the employees’ motivation. If excessive crunch time continues to occur, the employees—the company’s most valuable resource—should work to either change the organization or they will be compelled to move to a more supportive company. The books Peopleware and Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and Total Efficiency are great reminders on why we should work hard to take care of our teams.

mark Guzdial’s “the impact of open source on computing education” http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/ blog-cacm/72144 We had a Georgia Tech alum, Mike Terry (now at Waterloo) visit us a couple weeks ago. Mike’s research is on usability practices in open source. I got a chance to chat with Mike, and we talked about the impacts of open source on computing education, such as high school students getting started with computing by working in open source development. Overall, though, I came away concerned what the growth of open source development means for the future of computing education.

At a time when we are trying to broaden participation in computing, open source development is even more closed and less diverse than commercial software development. It is overwhelmingly white, Asian, and male. Some estimates suggest that less than 1% of open source developers are female.

Many kids and parents worry that all computer science jobs are being offshored and that it’s not worth studying computing. As more and more of the software we use daily is created via open source development, I wonder if kids and parents will hear the message, “Most software developers work for free, or at least have to work for free for years before they can become professional and get paid for their work.” Of course, that’s not true. Neither is it true that all IT jobs are being offshored, but that’s still what some people believe.

One of our challenges in computing education is convincing people that computing is broad and about more than programming. Open source

values code above all, or as Linux’s originator Linux Torvalds said, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” We’re trying to convince students that talk is also valuable in computing.

Finally, Mike’s talk was about how common usability practices are rare in open source development. Of course, that’s a concern in itself, but it’s particularly problematic for newcomers. When students develop toward being professionals, they frequently engage in a process that educators call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). It’s LPP when you start out in a company picking up trash (doing something legitimate on the periphery), and in so doing, figure out what happens in the company. Students can get started in software development at a company by doing tasks that aren’t directly about writing software, but are about the whole enterprise. These legitimate peripheral tasks serve as a stepping stone into the process, like writing documentation or running subjects in usability testing. If you don’t have usability testing, you don’t have that path into the process. Breaking into an open source development process is hard, and that keeps more students out than invites them in.

I wrote on this topic in my regular blog, and was surprised at the response. I learned that it is not acceptable to criticize religion, Santa Claus, or open source development—it’s a “good” that should just be accepted as such. I disagree. Open source development does generate enormous good, but it could do more good if it improved its practices. It’s hard to change open source development, because of its distributed nature. Open source developers should worry about the messages they send future developers, especially if they hope to grow and attract the development talent pool.

Daniel Reed’s “Paucity to Plethora: Jevons Paradox” http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/ blog-cacm/72373

Those of us of a certain
age remember when the university
computer (note the singular) was a sci-
entific and engineering shrine, protect-
ed by computer operators and secure
doors. We acolytes extended offerings
of FORTRAN, ALGOL, or COBOL via
punched card decks, hoping for the
blessings that accrued from a syntac-
tically correct program that compiled
and executed correctly.

Ruben Ortega is an engineering director at Google. Mark Guzdial is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Daniel Reed is vice president of Technology strategy & Policy and the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft.