Because software engineering often times distributes work across multiple people, a fundamental challenge in software engineering is ensuring that everyone on a team has the same understanding of what is being built and why. In the seminal book  The Mythical Man Month , Fred Brooks argued that good software needs to have  conceptual integrity , both in how it is designed, but also how it is implemented ^{5 5}

Fred P. Brooks (1995). The mythical man month. Pearson Education.

The solution is effective communication. As  some events  in industry have shown, communication requires empathy and teamwork. When communication is poor, teams become disconnected and produce software defects ^{4 4}

Nicolas Bettenburg, Ahmed E. Hassan (2013). Studying the impact of social interactions on software quality. Empirical Software Engineering.

It turns out, however, that communication plays such a powerful role in software projects that it even shapes how projects unfold. Perhaps the most notable theory about the effect of communication is Conway’s Law ^{6 6}

Melvin E. Conway (1968). How do committees invent. Datamation.

Because communication is so central, software engineers are constantly seeking information to further their work, going to their coworkers’ desks, emailing them, chatting via messaging platforms, and even using social media ^{8 8}

Amy J. Ko, Rob DeLine, and Gina Venolia (2007). Information needs in collocated software development teams. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.

Communication is not always effective. In fact, there are many kinds of communication that are highly problematic in software engineering teams. For example, Perlow ^{13 13}

Leslie A. Perlow (1999). The time famine: Toward a sociology of work time. Administrative science quarterly.

Communication isn’t just about transmitting information; it’s also about relationships and identity. For example, the dominant culture of many software engineering work environments—and even the  perceived  culture—is one that can deter many people from even pursuing careers in computer science. Modern work environments are still dominated by men, who speak loudly, out of turn, and disrespectfully, with sometimes even  sexual harassment ^{16 16}

Jennifer Wang' (2016). Female pursuit of Computer Science with Jennifer Wang. Software Engineering Daily Podcast.

When communication is effective, it still takes time. One of the key strategies for reducing the amount of communication necessary is  knowledge sharing  tools, which broadly refers to any information system that stores facts that developers would normally have to retrieve from a person. By storing them in a database and making them easy to search, teams can avoid interruptions. The most common knowledge sharing tools in software teams are issue trackers, which are often at the center of communication not only between developers, but also with every other part of a software organization ^{3 3}

Dane Bertram, Amy Voida, Saul Greenberg, and Robert Walker (2010). Communication, collaboration, and bugs: the social nature of issue tracking in small, collocated teams. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

Because all of this knowledge is so critical to progress, when developers leave an organization and haven’t archived their knowledge somewhere, it can be quite disruptive to progress. Organizations often have single points of failure, in which a single developer may be critical to a team’s ability to maintain and enhance a software product ^{14 14}

Peter C. Rigby, Yue Cai Zhu, Samuel M. Donadelli, and Audris Mockus (2016). Quantifying and mitigating turnover-induced knowledge loss: case studies of chrome and a project at Avaya. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.

What does all of this mean for you as an individual developer? To put it simply, don’t underestimate the importance of talking. Know who you need to talk to, talk to them frequently, and to the extent that you can, write down what you know both to lessen the demand for talking and mitigate the risk of you not being available, but also to make your knowledge more precise and accessible in the future. It often takes decades for engineers to excel at communication. The very fact that you know why communication is important gives you an critical head start.