Does Diversity Have a Role in Software Development?
The short answer is: yes it does. And I have some arsenal to back up this statement. Plenty of reasons can be found in the pages of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies by University of Michigan professor Scott Page. Page makes a compelling case that diversity is useful because it enhances a group’s ability to tackle hard problems and make accurate predictions. Could software development possibly benefit from such enhancement? You bet. You don’t have to take my word for it though. Read the book. Or read my latest IEEE Software column, titled Diversity and Software Development on why that should be so. And let me know what you think…
I think that’s a good insight.
In his book, “The wisdom of crowds”, James Surowiecki summarizes the conditions under which a group will be smarter than the sum of the individuals that make it. They are:
- The group has to be diverse
- Each member of the group must exercise his own judgment without undue influence or coercion from other members
- There has to be an easy way to aggregate the individual judgments into a collective one.
The first condition is in line with what you describe.
Alain, yes excellent point. Actually, Page discusses Surowiecki’s ideas and “crowds vs. experts” anecdotes in his book. I also have a paragraph on that point in my column. Page cautions that a small probability that an ordinary crowd will outperform individual experts in a specific predictive task may give rise to lots and lots of anecdotes if the population of the cases is large enough. But that doesn’t imply that this behavior is systematic or should generally be expected.