The IDE for Managers

IDE stands for integrated development environment. That is, an environment that offers integrated support for any work around a software system. This means that every time a developer leaves the environment, the I in IDE fails. By this measure, the typical IDEs fails developers at least 30% of the time. Even worse is that it fails non-technical people 100% of the time. Today’s IDEs do not even attempt to integrate the non-technical people. That is a fundamental flaw. In this talk, we show why the choice of the IDE is essential in software engineering, how an IDE should integrate the manager, and how that can be achieved in practice.

Non-technical people typically consider a software system to be an impenetrable black box. This is problematic as it creates a divide between the inner world of technology and the outer world of non-technologists. Yet, it does not have to be this way. Everything about software is data. Data is shapeless, but the tools we use give data shape that allows us to relate to it. When it comes to software, that tool is the integrated development environment (IDE). That’s right. The IDE. To make it truly integrated, we need to make it integrate everyone, including non-technical people.

In this talk you learn how the IDE could make the internal of software systems explainable, what characteristics should such an IDE have, and how you can architect the tooling for your own system. We exemplify the message through concrete live examples based on Glamorous Toolkit, the moldable development environment.

About Tudor Gîrba

Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).

He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.

These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.

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