https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3690928
In this time just before X-Mas, I sat down to read the latest issue of the Communications of the ACM. There are a few very interesting articles there, starting from a piece from Moshe Verdi on the concept of theoretical computer science, through an interesting piece of text on artificial AI to a very interesting article that I’m writing about now.
The starting point of this article is the fact that we, software engineers, are taught that we should talk to our customers, discover requirements together with them and validate our products together with them. At the same time, we design AI Engineering software without this in mind. A lot of start-ups (I will not mention any, but there are many) rush into providing tools that use LLMs to support software development tasks such as programming. However, we do not really know what the developers want.
In this article, they present a survey of almost 1,000 developers on what they want. Guess what – programming is NOT in the top three on this list. Testing, debugging, documentation or code analysis are the top requests. The developers enjoy creating code, what they do not enjoy is finding bugs or testing the software – it takes time and is not extremely productive. Yes, it feels great what you find you bug and yes, it feels great when the tests finally pass, but it feels even greater when you work on new feature or requirement.
We follow the same principle in Software Center. When creating new tools, we always asks the companies what they really need and how they need it. Now, we work on improving the process of debugging and defect analysis in CI/CD. We started by a survey. You can find it here. Please register if you want to see the results of the survey – and contribute!
With this, I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Let’s make 2025 even better than 2024!
