[Themaintainers] How to Build for the Handoff

[Camille E. Acey]

Actually a great many of us underrepresented people (women/ of color/ queer) in tech talk about empathy and software product development quite a lot.  In fact every episode of the Greater Than Code podcast touches on it https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/
Camille E. Acey
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde
-------- Original message --------From: Mason Scholl <strax22 at gmail.com> Date: 8/4/17  12:21  (GMT-05:00) To: Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel at gmail.com> Cc: Themaintainers <themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu> Subject: Re: [Themaintainers] How to Build for the Handoff 
In a similar vein, the Embedded podcast recently had an interview with Chris Svec (@christophersvec) about empathy driven software development.
http://embedded.fm/episodes/78

He gave a talk at the 2015 Embedded Systems Conference on the subject. You can find the slides here: http://chrissvec.com/empathy-driven-development-slides/ .
It's an interesting subject that most developers don't often think about.
On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 12:50 PM, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel at gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, thanks, Camille.

Andy and I gave a talk at a conference of maintenance professionals, Mainstream, a few months ago. I learned from one attendee that handoffs are an extremely difficult and fraught issue within technical organizations. In heavy industry and the energy sector, accidents and deaths, including around maintenance, often happen around shift changes. Companies are working hard to improve the process—often by using computerized management systems that standardize the information that is handed from one shift to another—but difficulties remain. 

Lee 

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 12:54 PM, Andrew Russell <arussell at arussell.org> wrote:
Thanks Camille - yes, relevant and fascinating. 
Apart from the merits of this approach as a good business practice, and sound/sane technical practice, the word that came to mind as I was reading was *courteous*.  How cool would it be if "courtesy" became a coding/business buzzword? (One can dream, right?)
Andy
On Jul 27, 2017, at 11:47 AM, Camille E. Acey <connect at camilleacey.com> wrote:


"Write and review code for maintainability, readability and extensibility (versus terseness or cleverness). Code that engineers can’t understand is code that engineers can’t build on, and it’s code engineers will want to throw out and rewrite. When we’re writing code to hand off, we stay wary of anything that is so clever it is opaque, where function and variable names aren’t readable, expressive, and clear, where the code structure makes it difficult to find what you need. Documentation should accompany most changes, and standard code style should be enforced throughout. "
https://trackchanges.postlight.com/how-to-build-for-the-handoff-a2af3421be11
I thought this was a relevant read! 
-- 

Camille E. Acey
 http://camilleacey.com
 
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde


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Starting Fall 2017—Assistant Professor 
Department of Science and Technology in Society
Virginia Tech
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