0 7 4 0 - 7 4 5 9 / 1 6 / $ 3 3 . 0 0 © 2 0 1 6 I E E E JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 | IEEE SOFTWARE 45

FOCUS: PERSPECTIVES—BRAZIL

Brazil and the Emerging Future of Software Engineering

Claudia de O. Melo, Ronaldo Ferraz, and Rebecca J. Parsons

TECHNOLOGY IS TRANSFORMING our world at an accelerating pace. Massive changes are taking place in how we learn, socialize, bank, grow food, drive, generate energy, inter-act with government, and even wage war. Digital has come of age. We’re now a technology economy in which software is the business and disrup-tions come from unlikely sources. These fast-paced changes bring new value and agility to our society but more uncertainty and complexity.

Technology evolution is driven by recombination. Recombination of cloud computing, data analyt-ics, security, new hardware devices, interactive interfaces, the quantifi-cation of the self, and AI technolo-gies will continue, creating unprec-edented applications and scientific disciplines. This revolution leads to fundamental questions that, in Peter Drucker’s words, “are not technical but human.”1

As society shapes technology and vice versa, what future does society want to create through technology? What are the constraints? What are the roles of the technologist and other players? Transparency, emer-gence, and sustainable development are certainly part of the answer.

Transparency over CautionOrganizations take risks when shar-ing information with stakeholders. Even though it might seem safer to not be transparent, a culture of dis-closure and openness is healthier than closed caution. Transparency should be the default for democratic, accountable governments in protect-ing rights such as citizen privacy. Ac-countability and responsibility come more easily when information is available, and transparency is safer

FROM THE GUEST EDITORSAlthough this issue focuses on software engineering’s future through an academic lens, it’s equally interesting to get industry perspectives because software engi-neering is tightly related to practice. Given software development’s increasingly global nature, we felt that getting global perspectives of software engineering’s future was important. Along this line, we invited Claudia Melo, Ronaldo Ferraz, and Rebecca Parsons from ThoughtWorks to share their views of software engi-neering’s future from a Brazilian perspective.

Why Brazil? Brazil’s IT industry is large. A.T. Kearney, a consulting company, estimates that the sector employs 1.7 million people, including programmers, systems analysts, and managers.1 It has been growing by 6.5 percent on average annually since 2005. Of Brazil’s annual 420,000 university graduates, 25,000 are technology graduates. The industry’s export component is only a small part of the overall national industry. Brazil’s IT BPO (business process outsourcing) export market turned over US$ 2.2 billion in 2008. Although Brazilian IT still represents a fairly small slice of the global IT trade, A.T. Kearney positions Brazil favorably in its annual rankings of outsourcing destinations and IT. —Guest Editors

Reference

46 IEEE SOFTWARE | W W W.COMPUTER.ORG/SOFT WARE | @IEEESOFT WARE

FOCUS: PERSPECTIVES—BRAZIL

than people proceeding cautiously in ignorance. Technology has a signi� -cant role to play in enabling trans-parency for governments and their citizens as well as for organizations and their stakeholders.

Emergence over PredictabilitySimplistic models no longer serve us in understanding the world. Operat-ing forces are complex and interre-lated and easily disturbed through unforeseen actions of multiple play-ers. Technology harnesses the en-ergy of those complex interactions and processes that de� ne and sustain our world to create more technol-ogy. The whole ecosystem, including technologists, needs to develop and learn nimble approaches to deal with such complexity.

One example involves the volume

and accessibility of data. Technol-ogy has lowered the entry barrier for providing data, and sources abound to the point of overwhelming people and organizations. However, data without context, reasoning, and jus-ti� cation is simply data. So, assessing the progress of our plans, the needs of the ecosystem, the potential of new ideas, and the impact of interactions at large requires us to understand the con� dence level of that data and the conclusions derived from it.

Sustainable Development in Countries Such as BrazilSuch development, however, doesn’t necessarily balance all three di-mensions of sustainable develop-ment—economic, social, and envi-ronmental. Developing countries have different social and economic

priorities and needs, such as better income distribution, higher living standards, employment, education, and health. Technology is an integral part of the solution but also a threat. The Edward Snowden revelations are recent examples of how technology can be used to concentrate economic power and create global monopolies.

Brazil has forces that provide tre-mendous opportunities for sustain-able development and technological innovation. It’s a world leader in ag-riculture; plant and animal diversity; and ecology, biology, and biochem-istry. Global in� uencers such as Ri-cardo Semler and Paulo Freire and their revolutionary work on organi-zational design and education still in-spire researchers and organizations.

However, we still see more adap-tation and imitation than innovation. We believe the public sector has a fundamental role in the next several years to create policies and decision-making approaches around technol-ogy to address these pressing issues.

Marco Civil (the Brazilian civil-rights framework for the Internet) is a great example of how governments can play a key role in addressing problems that lie not in law and pol-icy but in technology. It aims to pro-tect human rights, including ensuring freedom of speech and expression, protecting privacy and personal data, ensuring equitable access to informa-tion, and promoting an open, com-petitive online marketplace, partly by guaranteeing net neutrality.

The Technologist’s RoleTechnology will continue to acceler-ate, changing how our societies are organized and how our lives inter-sect with the planet’s health. Melvin Kranzberg said, “Technology is nei-ther good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”2

Its impacts can’t be predicted.

CLAUDIA DE O. MELO is the director of technology at

ThoughtWorks Latin America. Contact her at cmelo@

thoughtworks.com.

RONALDO FERRAZ is the chief capability of� cer at

ThoughtWorks. Contact him at rferraz@thoughtworks.com.

REBECCA J. PARSONS is the chief technology of� cer at

ThoughtWorks. Contact her at rjparson@thoughtworks.com.

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 | IEEE SOFTWARE 47

Practitioners can no longer afford to stand on the side of technology as just software creation. Advances in language workbenches, multi­location databases and file systems, and adaptive syntaxes let us tackle the growing complexity of building the planetary­scale systems required now. However, they’re insufficient to connect practitioners to the human­driven, experiential, and interrelated business nature of modern software.

Practitioners must become media­tors of the process of creating a hu­mane experience and expand their practice to draw from disciplines such as experience design, systems thinking, economics, and digital strategy. They must do what they can to mitigate the negative conse­quences of technology while con­tinuing to exploit and amplify its positive impacts.

References 1. P. Drucker, “Technology and Society

in the Twentieth Century,” Tech-

nology, Management, and Society,

Routledge, 1970.

2. M. Kranzberg, “Kranzberg’s Laws,”

Technology and Culture, vol. 27, no.

3, 1986, pp. 544–560.

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