Can software engineering teams adapt biological principles?

May 5, 2006 | article by Ken Thompson in Virtual Software Development (10)

Ken Thompson, speaking at the 2006 SPICE Conference in Luxembourg (May 5) has facilitated an interactive session with leading practitioners and researchers in the field of Software Process Improvement (SPI) on this challenging question.

Ken is an ex-software engineer and now works to improve the effectiveness of all kinds of teams including software engineering teams.

"Nature's best teams demonstrate neither thinking nor beliefs, they are it is simply stimulus-response engines, yet they can achieve things totally out of proportion to their size and brainpower".

But can our software engineering teams, which perhaps represent the pinnacle of intensive knowledge-based teamwork, learn anything from these ‘bioteams’?

Ken first introduced the results of research carried out over the last two years in the area of bioteaming.

This has resulted in a ‘bioteaming manifesto’ with 12 practical rules for making a team more effective through biological principles.

At the conference we then used the manifesto in a unique real-time interactive session using mobile phones and wireless internet to stimulate ideas on how these principles might be adapted for software engineering teams?

As part of the conference we also initiated a research survey to establish the impact of team member beliefs on software team performance.

To download a PDF of Ken's presentation click here

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I have been using a biological approach for software development, maintenance, and support for many years.

Please see my blog at:

http://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/index.html

Softwarephysics is a fun, but useful, combination of physics, biology, and computer science that I have been using for more than 25 years.

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Posted by: Steve Johnston | April 18, 2007 5:21 PM

Bioteams Books Reviews

The short message phenomenon challenged

March 9, 2006 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

We are bombarded with the idea its good to talk and its good to text. But is texting and other forms of mobile phone interaction a useful form of communication? Or is it even a form of communication at all or something totally different? In a mini-book "Heidegger, Habermas and the mobile phone" the author invokes some key thinkers of the twentieth century to offer an essential alternative to the new doctrine of 'm-communication': Martin Heidegger, who saw humanity as ‘the entity which talks’ and Jürgen Habermas, current-day advocate of authentic communication.

Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK

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Click here to check all Bioteams book reviews

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