The first day of class (ECE2524: Introduction to Unix for Engineers) I asked participents the  open ended question “What makes good software good?” and asked them to answer both “for the developer” and “for the consumer”.

I generated a list of words and phrases for each sub-response and then normalized it based on my own intuition (e.g. I changed “simplicity” to “simple”, “easy to use” to “intuitive”, etc.). I then dumped the list into Wordle to generate these images:

Good Software for the Consumer

Good Software for the Developer

For a future in-class exercise I plan to ask participants to link the common themes that appear in these word clouds back to specific rules mentioned in the reading.