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EuroSTAR Conference

Europe's Largest Quality Engineering Conference

Track Talk

Software Quality and Human Factors – our next challenge

Andrew Brown

10:30-11:00 CEST Wednesday 29th September

We have achieved huge advances in how we build software. Agile and DevOps, plus new tools and programming languages allow us to deliver products and systems in ways not previously possible.

Yet in many important ways, we have failed to make any significant advances. Projects deliver just as late and over budget as they ever have. Much software fails to do what the user needs. The proportion of failed projects is largely unchanged from fifty years ago. And levels of technical debt are higher than ever.

Why have we made huge advances in some areas, but not others?

The answer is that all software development problems contain both technical factors and human factors. We are an industry that attracts individuals interested in technology, so we excel at solving the technical parts of every problem, whilst neglecting the human aspects. Consequently, the largest outstanding challenges that we face today are not technical, but residual human factors. Unless we begin to address the human factors underlying these problems, we will continue to suffer them.

How can we address these human factors?

In this session, Dr Andrew Brown shares key findings from his five-year research project into human factors in software development, the subject of his forthcoming book. He shows that the largest unaddressed challenges in software development, such as overrunning projects, unwarranted risk-taking, and technical debt, are not technical challenges and so cannot be addressed by any technical means.

Instead, he shows that these challenges are driven by human factors, notably a series of cognitive biases that drive sub-optimal decisions and behaviour. He then traces these cognitive biases to our evolutionary past, showing that our sub-optimal behaviour on projects today is caused by thought processes developed to solve survival and other problems in our evolutionary past.

Dr Brown shows how you can develop a programme to reduce your organisation’s vulnerability to these problems, using a combination of awareness training, debiasing techniques, plus changes to your decision process and culture.

What you will learn

  1. The biggest and most long-standing challenges we face in software development are not technical, but human factors.
  2. These problems will remain unresolved until we address these human factors.
  3. These human factors can be addressed using lessons from behavioural sciences.

Session Details

  • Introductory
  • 30 Minutes
  • Live Q&A
  • New technologies and challenges
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Check out this video from Andrew Brown to hear more about his talk on Software Quality and Human Factors – our next challenge.

We look forward to welcoming you to EuroSTAR 2021, 28-30 Sept!

Session Speaker

Andrew Brown EuroSTAR speaker
Best Paper Winner 2017

Andrew Brown

Consultant – Expleo, United Kingdom

Dr Andrew Brown is a principal consultant at Expleo. He leads an independent line of research into understanding why we humans make the mistakes that lead to software defects.

He has 25 years’ experience in the software industry. Previous roles include Head of QA at HMV, Head of QA at a financial software house and a test manager in Japan. He holds a degree in Physics and Maths, an MBA from Warwick Business School and a doctorate from Imperial College

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