I’ve recently read Hans Roslund’s book “Factfulness”, which is about the ability to recognize patterns and analyze data in the global scale. The book is about global trends like poverty, education, health, etc. Not much, if anything, about software engineering.
However, when reading I constantly thought about its relation to software analytics. In software analytics we look at software products and activities with the goal to find patterns and to understand what’s going on with our products. We produce diagrams and knowledge that stems from these diagrams. Although we provide a lot of information about the software, I’ve not really seen much work on the interpretation of software analytics.
The examples of software analytics, which I’ve stumbled on, usually are about designing diagrams and triggering decisions. They are rarely about putting this in context. How do we know that we need to take actions to reduce complexity? Is our product exceptionally complex? or is it just that all software products are getting complex?
Maybe we should dedicate more time to discuss consequences about software analytics — become more factful!
Link to the book: https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/
