Musical Practices in Software Development: Insights from Gary Marcus’s Guitar Zero

Abstract

Our goal was to read the book “Guitar zero: The new musician and the science of learning” and find out whether any of the ideas that were presented in this book could be applied to the software development process. After a thorough and comprehensive analysis, we singled out six fundamental musical practices that could be adopted by teams of software engineers to improve their development process. For two of them - team code reviews and personal sprint goal - we performed preliminary experiments, which were aimed at gathering feedback about the usefulness of such practices for software developers.