On 11/30/2013 9:39 PM, Stephen Cameron wrote:

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.

I just had a thought: are software trainwrecks caused by the promulgation of an inappropriate metaphor?

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