Relevance for Software Engineering


This chapter focuses on learning processes in software development. Specifically, it starts by examining the profession of software engineering as a reflective practice. According to this perspective, software developers are encouraged to continuously reflect on what they create as well as on the creation process itself, and to learn from such reflections. Then, software development is put in a wider context and is examined from the perspective of learning organizations. This perspective highlights the importance of communal knowledge and learning processes. More specifically , learning organizations aim to improve their performance by integrating learning processes and activities into their daily routines. All together, this chapter aims to illustrate how software developers may learn and improve their performance by continuously reflecting on their ways of thinking as well as by learning from their colleagues and working environment.

Because the discipline of software engineering is updated on a regular basis, one is unable to learn all that is included in the field. Rather, one has to find ways to foster one s professional skills by learning (in addition to the material itself) about learning processes and the use of such processes for the enhancement of personal and collective learning. In addition, the success of many software development projects relies on learning from previous experience. The perspective, by which one learns from the cumulative learning (of oneself and of the collective), gets its importance mainly from these facts that refer to software projects success and failure.

From what we just said, the relevance of the two topics ”reflective practice and learning organization ”to software engineering is quite clear. The main question we address in this chapter is how to achieve and apply these practices. An important related practice that we hope to convey in this chapter is team learning. Senge [Senge94] says that the process of learning collectively is unfamiliar to most people because it has nothing to do with school-learning (pp. 355 “356). We believe that experienced software developers feel that the concept of team-based learning process fits very well into software organizations.




Human Aspects of Software Engineering
Human Aspects of Software Engineering (Charles River Media Computer Engineering)
ISBN: 1584503130
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 242

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