Why Software Engineers Don’t Listen to What Psychologists Don’t Tell Them Anyway

Abstract

This chapter centres on two observations. First,although software engineering environments are among the most interesting and enterprising products created by software engineers, they frequently contain features seen by psychologists and cognitive ergonomists as usability blunders. On the face of it, this problem stems directly from the second problem,which is that software engineers pay little or no heed to empirical results obtained by cognitive ergonomists and psychologists, even where directly relevant. These two problems have been seen by some (including the author) as exasperating failings on the part of software engineers. I here suggest a different interpretation, which I hope does better justice to software engineers and to the realities of science. In many cases,hard-to-use software engineering environments should be viewed not as failed systems but as successful experiments,which have shown that a particular computational model or style is inadequate. Thus, the first problem is not the engineers’ problem but the psychologists’ misappreciation (at least to some extent), while the second problem demonstrates not wilful deafness but the absence of a workable communication path. Evidently,improved communication is badly needed. Many ways have been suggested to improve knowledge transfer, but most can be dismissed as unsuitable. My suggestion is that a distinct, semi formal framework of concepts (such as ’cognitive dimensions of notations’) should be consciously adopted as a ’boundary object’, accessible to software engineers from one side and to cognitive ergonomists and psychologists from the other side.