Software engineering

Teams that build software are largely demographically homogeneous. Without diversity, homogeneous perspectives dominate how, why, and for whom software is designed. To understand how teams can successfully build and sustain diversity, we interviewed 11 engineers and 9 managers from some of the most gender and racially diverse teams at Google, a large software company. Qualitatively analyzing...

Design review is an important initial phase of the software development life-cycle where stakeholders gain and discuss early insights into the design’s viability, discover potentially costly mistakes, and identify inconsistencies and inadequacies. For improved development velocity, it is important that design owners get their designs approved as quickly as possible. In this paper, we discuss...

In an ideal Continuous Integration (CI) workflow, all potentially impacted builds/tests would be run before submission for every proposed change. In large-scale environments like Google’s mono-repository, this is not feasible to do in terms of both latency and compute cost, given the frequency of change requests and overall size of the codebase. Instead, the compromise is to run more...

Communicating and justifying design decisions are difficult, especially when the architecture design has to evolve. In this paper, we report our experiences of using formal but lightweight design models to communicate, justify, and analyze the quality trade-offs of an architecture revision plan for Monarch, a large-scale legacy system from Google. We started from a few critical user scenarios...