exploring the relationship between social science and software development methodologies: a blog by Pascal Belouin

One of the main issues in the design of most commercial software products is what is commonly called ‘domain definition’. This activity could be roughly understood as the definition of the ‘objects’ and processes that the system will have to manage or provide support for. An interesting thing about domain definition is that it could [...]

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As we have seen, themes such as meaning, interactions, communication, values and identities are widely explored in disciplines such as for instance sociology or psychology. The question then arises of the way sociological theory (for example) could allow a better understanding of the social aspects of interactive systems (again, for lack of a better word): [...]

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§36 · March 5, 2010 · Theory · 1 comment · Tags: , ,


As I tried to show in my previous post, the apparition of agile development methodologies could be interpreted as a sign of an evolution of the discourse surrounding software development (and, therefore, software itself) towards social topics. Below are a few aspects of agile development methods that appear particularly significant in this context. As illustrated [...]

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This post is based on the slides from my talk at dev8D and various research proposals and essays. Although it’s a relatively young discipline, software design already has a rich history, punctuated by epic failures, a lot of innovation and incredible successes. Indeed, With the explosion of the Web, it could be argued that the [...]

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After years of pondering, I have finally decided to write down the few ideas that occur to me when I start thinking about the relationship between social scientific topics and software/interactive system development. The starting point of this reflection is an observation that software development methodologies seem to be slowly drifting towards social scientific matters. [...]

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