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. My main argument is that the apparition of agile development methodologies and other user-centric approaches to development could be understood as an indication of the fact that software developers are starting to give more and more importance to issues of meaning, communication, and values.
The purpose of this blog is therefore to explore this shift in the way software development is perceived, and hopefully to provide interesting leads for exploring in more details how social scientific concepts borrowed from Foucault, Bourdieu, Mauss, Weber, Durkheim, Rose (I know, it sounds a bit cocky) and more generally social scientific litterature can be applied to a better understanding of software development, and even provide the basis for the elaboration of novel software development methodologies. Let’s just hope I don’t abandon the blog after 3 posts!
Pascal
Related posts:
- What does the apparition of agile and user-centric development methodologies mean from an interdisciplinary point of view?
- Software as Discourse
- Applying social scientific concepts to domain definition: a short overview
- The Emergence of Meaning Through System Use: The central role of interaction and its implications in terms of design methodology
- A short and biased history of software development methodologies