The Shape of Code

The Cognitive capitalism chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book took longer than expected to polish; in fact it got reworked, rather than polished (which still needs to happen, and there might be more text moving from other chapters).

Changing the chapter title, from Economics to Cognitive capitalism, helped clarify lots of decisions about the subject matter it ought to contain (the growth in chapter page count is more down to material moving from other chapters, than lots of new words from me).

I over-spent time down some interesting rabbit holes (e.g., real options), before realising that no public data was available, and unlikely to be available any time soon. Without data, there is not a lot that can be said in a data driven book.

Social learning is a criminally under researched topic in software engineering. Some very interesting work has been done by biologists (e.g., Joseph Henrich, and Kevin Laland), in the last 15 years; the field has taken off. There is a huge amount of social learning going on in software engineering, and virtually nobody is investigating it.

As always, if you know of any interesting software engineering data, please let me know.

Next, the Ecosystems chapter.