WORKSHOP PROGRAM

Summary: While software engineering has traditionally focused on artifacts—code, processes, tools and so forth—there has been an increasing emphasis in recent years on the people and teams that build those artifacts. This can be traced back to the origins of software engineering as a discipline. For example, in 1968 Melvin Conway described, in a short paper, what has now become known as “Conway’s Law” which claimed that the structure of a software system reflects the social structure of the organization that produced it. Since there are countless ways to structure organizations and countless ways to structure systems, it stands to reason that some of these structures will be sub-optimal. Furthermore, it stands to reason that some mappings of organizational designs onto system designs will also be sub-optimal. Those sub-optimal mappings are instances of what we have come to call social debt. In this talk I will discuss how you can identify “community smells”—sub-optimal community structures that lead to social debt—and how you can monitor these smells just as you would monitor technical debt, test coverage, feature velocity or any other aspect of the development process. Finally, I will discuss how you, as an architect, can take proactive steps to avoid or repair these smells, before they doom your project to failure.