Sun, 09 Oct 2005
PNSQC annotated bibliography
In my Pacific Northwest Software
Quality Conference talk, I'm going to
throw out a blizzard of references. Here they are.
-
"The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language
about language", Michael J. Reddy,
in Metaphor and
Thought (2/e), Andrew Ortony (ed.)
-
Shows how our standard metaphor for communication is one of
shipping something from one mind to another via a conduit. Many
examples. I don't think that's the way communication really
works, so the metaphor misleads us into thinking requirements
documents are a good idea, and that the reason they so often
fail is that we're not smart or dedicated enough.
-
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty
-
Takes apart the idea that concepts and words are direct
mappings of hard-edged categories in the world. Sometimes that
works. Sometimes it doesn't. Requirements documents
assume that words can capture what the solution to a problem
essentially is. But if that's not possible, in general...
-
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Lakoff
-
A more empirical treatment of the same idea. Categories have
fuzzy edges, partly because most lack a single defining
characteristic that must be present.
-
Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-critical Philosophy, Polyani
-
A discussion of tacit knowledge.
-
Refactoring, Fowler
-
I tell the Advancer story, which is uses the Method Object
refactoring, which is described in Fowler.
-
Cognition in the Wild,
Hutchins
-
I suggest the Advancer story is an example of Hutchin's
distributed cognition, the notion that it sometimes doesn't make
sense to say that particular people solve a problem. Instead,
it's more useful to point to an assemblage of people and things
as doing the thinking. So the common statement "the code is trying
to tell us something" is not meaningless.
-
Fit for Developing
Software: Framework for Integrated Tests, Mugridge and Cunningham
-
I use Fit tables as examples of examples.
-
"Soap Opera Testing", Buwalda
-
Soap opera tests have the same relationship to normal uses of
the product as soap operas have to real life: drastically
condensed and exaggerated.
-
Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Galison
-
Galison discusses how different groups of people collaborate on
shared goals. He claims that they develop "trading languages"
(like trading pidgins and creoles) to organize their
work. I believe his analysis fits project teams.
-
Domain-Driven Design, Evans
-
Evans's "ubiquitous language" is an example of a Galison
trading language.
-
"The Good, the Bad, and the Agile Customer", Alesandro, Better
Software, November/December 2005.
-
An example of gradually tuning communication to suit both a
business representative and a development team.
-
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave & Wenger
-
A description of how types of learning like apprenticeship
work. Not an easy read. I wrote a review and summary.
-
How to Do
Things with Words (2/e), Austin
-
Austin talks about "performatives", which are sentences that
don't describe the world but rather do things in it. ("I now
pronounce you husband and wife.") Performatives don't really
fit in the "words map to categories in the world" framework.
-
Limited, Inc., Derrida
-
Derrida (I'm told) argues here that all statements are
performatives. (I haven't read the book yet - I've not found
Derrida to be easy reading.) That makes sense to me: we utter
things to change the world. Even when I'm defining a word for
my daughter, I'm changing the world inside her head.
That's where I end, having given 16 tactics for improving
communication, each compatible with this nonstandard view. My
ending motto is this:
As intermediaries, we do not need to
send abstractions down the conduit from the business to the programmer.
Anything that provokes the programmer to write the right code is fine by us.
## Posted at 09:49 in category /misc
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