What Makes Software Work?

A Software Design Tech Talk presented by Daniel Jackson on 2024-05-14. Hosted by SWEdu, the Google School of Software Engineering.
ABSTRACT: Why some software products succeed and others fail is rarely clear, even with hindsight, and success involves many factors. But one factor is always necessary: a compelling usage scenario. This scenario typically doesn’t let users do something they couldn’t do before, but makes doing something they already want to do easier.

I’ll give several examples of this, and then generalize this idea to thinking of software products in terms of “concepts”—small services that provide coherent value and that, while being composable, have no mutual dependencies. I’ll illustrate the use of concepts in clarifying software design, and will tell you about some recent work in which concepts, due to their modular qualities, enable LLM-based generation of an entire app.

About the Speaker: Daniel Jackson is professor of computer science at MIT, and associate director of CSAIL. For his research in software, he won the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Award, the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award and was made an ACM Fellow. He is the lead designer of the Alloy modeling language, and author of Software Abstractions. He chaired a National Academies study on software dependability, and has collaborated on software projects with NASA on air-traffic control, with Massachusetts General Hospital on proton therapy, and with Toyota on autonomous cars. His book, Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design, was recently published by Princeton University Press. Jackson is also a keen photographer.