What would be really interesting is a case study of how this influences decision-making in a different direction compared to the more common framework. Without that, I have no idea whether anything in this post is actually useful, despite being a very nice description incorporating quite correct facts.
Author here, thanks for your comment! Can you elaborate on what you’d hope to see in such a case study? Maybe I can file that away for a future post. I mentioned incident analysis as one way to put these perspectives to _use_, would a case study of applying lessons learned from incident analysis towards roadmap / work planning fit the bill? (As an aside, there’s lots of that at https://www.learningfromincidents.io/).
Also curious to know what you believe the more common framework looks like.
All communication technology is social, so software can't really escape that aspect, but we also haven't even scratched the surface of actually understanding the social aspects of our technologies. This is why diversity of people in the production of technology is important, and by diversity I mean different perspectives not different colors, people from psychological, neuroscience, philosophy, sociology etc. backgrounds.
Extending this idea further, you can place legislative, political, and other external events on this timeline. Visualizing the regulatory impacts both to users and the system might be interesting.
In DDD this is discussed regularly [1]. Conway's law about how the communication patterns of an organization dictate the software architecture was probably the starting point of these considerations.
The relationship between a software system and the people who build and operate it does not get discussed enough in this industry. This read won't give you answers to the many questions we have yet to answer or discuss, but it presents the topic well enough that I hope it gets some of y'all to think a little more about it.
