Re: [xml-dev] Re: XML As Fall Guy
Hi Mike,
I think you are getting to the heart of it, but the analogy I like is making a movie, the final result is very open-ended and coordinating the activity of getting a result very complex, also, whether the end result is a success is very much dependant on intimate knowledge of the humans who will view (use) the outcome.
On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Michael Sokolov <[email protected]> wrote:
On 11/30/2013 9:39 PM, Stephen Cameron wrote:I just had a thought: are software trainwrecks caused by the promulgation of an inappropriate metaphor?
The idea that we think we know something well, but in fact often all we have is a fuzzy concept (something I learned from my topic maps reading), this extends to experts as I recall from the days of expert systems being the next big thing, that often when asked to explain their thinking, it turned out the experts used rules-of-thumb to handle uncertainty, sometimes without realising such. Changing systems potentially challenges the status of experts as they have to justify such rules-of-thumb. You can also think of this as unknown-unknowns problem.
Maybe if people stopped thinking of designing and building and architecting - software development as architecture and civil engineering - and instead thought about planning and mapping and provisioning and discovery - software development as polar exploration - then a proper respect for the unknowability of the solution at the outset would be built in to the process.
-Mike