Software Engineering as a Craft An Article by Thomas Wilson thomaswilson.xyz The decreasingly tangible product of code, i.e. that all we have are files on a hard-drive, may make it easy to forget that writing software produces a thing. If you produce a wonky chair or an overly long fork, it’s easy to see the quality of work was not great. By calling for a perception of software as a craft, we fight against that ability to forget or not notice the final quality of the product. You could watch two software engineers with different levels of experience, or in different domains, and it wouldn’t necessarily be so easy to guess which is which, at least from a distance. So maybe there is something to be said for the value of software as a craft, for sometimes focusing on the practice of making better, or at least different, software just for the sake of it. craftsoftware
PM and UX Have Markedly Different Views of Their Job Responsibilities A Research Paper by Kara Pernice & Raluca Budiu www.nngroup.com The graph shows 3 research-related tasks and the percentage of PMs and UXers who agreed on whether PM or UX should be responsible for each. A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design. uxmanagement