Getting Outside the Bug Boxes (Keynote)

Abstract

Sometimes, we humans find ourselves a bit slow to abandon the comfort of sitting “inside the box”, and this can detract from our ability to innovate. In this talk, I’ll share some outside-the-box perspectives, gleaned from decades of software engineering work, on boxes I’ve seen when thinking about bugs — from failures to faults, from finding to fixing, and from traditional to very non-traditional notions of “what counts” as a bug. I’ll consider the intellectually freeing perspectives that can come from moving outside the “mechanisms” box to policies; the enhancement to applicability from moving outside sub-sub-area boxes to the whole software lifecycle; the differences revealed when moving outside the “typical developer” box to diverse humans; and the plethora of possibilities arising from moving outside the “buggy code” box to a wide range of bug types.