The Shape of Code

What useful, practical things might professional software developers learn from the Cognitive capitalism chapter in my evidence-based software engineering book?

This week I checked the cognitive capitalism chapter; what useful things did I learn (combined with everything I learned during all the other weeks spent working on this chapter)?

Software systems are the product of cognitive capitalism (more commonly known as economics).

My experience is that most software developers don’t know anything about economics, so everything in this chapter is likely to be new to them. The chapter is more tutorial like than the other chapters.

Various investment models are discussed. The problem with these kinds of models is obtaining reliable data. But, hopefully the modelling ideas will prove useful.

Things I learned about when writing the chapter include: social learning, group learning, and Open source licensing is a mess.

Building software systems usually requires that many of the individuals involved to do lots of learning. How do people decide what to learn, e.g., copy others or strike out on their own? This problem is not software specific, in fact social learning appears to be one of the major cognitive abilities that separates us from other apes.

Organizational learning and forgetting is much talked about, and it was good to find some data dealing with this. Probably not applicable to most people.

Open source licensing is a mess in that software containing a variety of, possible incompatible, licenses often gets mixed together. What future lawsuits await?

For me, potentially the most immediately useful material was group learning; there are some interesting models for how this sometimes works.

Readers might have a completely different learning experience from reading the cognitive capitalism chapter. What useful things did you learn from the cognitive capitalism chapter?