Investing in Software DesignFrom Technology to Culture: How Collaboration and Communication Matter

Companies that design, develop, and deploy software products at scale face a learning gap. To be effective, software developers need to continuously conceptualize, collaborate, and communicate – to share and learn from each other. To sustain a competitive edge, companies need to invest in collaborative learning. Recommended investments include a mix of education and collaboration programs to share design ideas: for example, internal conferences, facilitated workshops, subject matter knowledge networks, and talent exchanges. In this experience report, we outline strategies that reflect the authors’ experiences from software product organizations spanning multiple development centers across six continents.CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering~Designing software • Social and professional topics~Computing education • Human-centered computing~Collaborative and social computing systems and tools