Case study

Alice is a software project manager working in a company that develops alarm systems. This company wishes to enter the growing market of assistive technology to help elderly and disabled people live independently. Alice has been asked to lead a team of 6 developers than can develop new products based around the company’s alarm technology. Her first role is to select team members either from software engineers already in the company or from outside.

To help select a team, Alice first assesses the skills that she will need: These are:

• Experience with existing alarm technology as it is reused
• User interface design experience because the users are untrained and may be disabled and hence need facilities such as variable font sizes, etc.
• Ideally, someone who has experience of designing assistive technology systems. Otherwise, someone with experience of interfacing to hardware units as all systems being developed involve some hardware control.
• General-purpose development skills.

The next stage is to try and find people from within the company with the necessary skills. However, the company has expanded significantly and has few staff available. The best that Alice can negotiate is to have help from an alarm expert (Fred) for 2 days/week. She therefore decides to advertise for new project staff, listing the attributes that she’d like:

1. Programming experience in C. She has decided to develop all the assistive technology control software in C.
2. Experience in user interface design. A UI designer is essential but there may not be a need for a full-time appointment.
3. Experience in hardware interfacing with C and using remote development systems. All the devices used have complex hardware interfaces.
4. Experience of working with hardware engineers. At times, it will be necessary to build completely new hardware.
5. A sympathetic personality so that they can relate to and work with elderly people who are providing requirements for and are testing the system.

Alice gets 30 responses to the advert and, from the applicants, is able to identify suitable candidates with hardware interfacing (Dorothy) and user interface design experience (Ed). She also decides to hire two new graduates (Brian and Bob) who have some C programming experience but who will essentially have to be trained in the company.

All that remains then is to appoint a more senior programmer to join the development team and Alice has two choices. Carol has several years C programming experience and has recently taken a short career break to have children. Dave has a comparable amount of programming experience and is a programming enthusiast. He spends most of his spare time working on open source development projects and has encyclopaedic knowledge of C and C++.

After interviewing both Carol and Dave, Alice decides to offer the job to Carol although Dave has deeper programming knowledge.

Lessons learned

Some characteristic lessons from this case study are:

1. If you are looking for people with specific skills from inside the company, the manager of the project where they are already working may not wish to lose them. Sometimes, you have to accept that people will only be able to work for part of the time on your project.
2. Skills such as user interface design and hardware interfacing are in short supply. You may not have a wide choice of applicants for these posts, especially if the company is not located near other software industries.
3. Recent graduates may not have the specific skills you need but they are normally enthusiastic and may have been exposed to up-to-date technology.
4. It doesn’t always make sense to employ the most technically proficient person for a technical development job. In this job, interaction with elderly users may be required and Alice decides that Carol is likely to be more sympathetic to their problems.