an entry from

Piotr's R&D blog

I'm in an invited talks session with a very generic title. The invited talks get the biggest room at the conference, and seem to be well attended.

Usability in Open Source

Thesis: open source deals well with functionality challenges (by distributing the work, mainly), but is not so good at usability. We're trying, design blogs are good, but need to do more to involve users. The speaker was good, but the presentation went all over the place at extreme speeds, so it's very difficult to summarize. His final idea is the good old "let's make putting applications together easier so we don't need so many software engineers". Of course, he doesn't say how to do it.

How software can help or hinder decision making

A real live psychologist is presenting! He looks the part, with wild grey hair and a hunched, understated look. Unfortunately, his slides are alternatively full of swaths of text and numbers, occasionally interrupted by a series of all-too-similar graphs. he goes into way too much detail on his study, where he seems to have demonstrated that a computer system that claims to assist in mammograph interpretation decisions can actually harm them. Although studies show that on average the system works fine, he uses some fancy statistics to reveal that its effects depend on the skill of the user (I think). Overall, I think he failed to aim his talk properly at his audience, since I still have no idea how this affects software engineering beyond "computers can hurt people, be careful and consult a psychologist who knows statistics". Oh, and learn how to prepare talks for a non-specialist audience.