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

I recently had the opportunity to write a first draft for a web application allowing office workers to order hot and cold drinks online. It’s far from perfect, but gives an idea of how this problem can be approached! Introduction The aim of this document is to provide a first draft design for an online [...]

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I have tried to show in previous posts how certain aspects of an interactive system such as how it works, what it does, or what it represents, could be seen as emerging in the framework of its actual use. Furthermore, I have tried to provide a theoretical grounding to such an approach by borrowing from [...]

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Interactionism is a social scientific tradition that relies on the assumption that the “real” world is actively constructed by people: It therefore views the mind primarily as a tool for solving the “pragmatic concerns” of everyday life. Thus, the basis of all social life can be found in all the small interactions we conduct every [...]

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I am currently working on a medium-size web development project for a public organisation: the project is implemented by a small, agile team of developers external to the organisation (rather talented I must say!) on the basis of specifications written by myself and my colleague. These specs mostly consist on word documents as well as [...]

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Although only remotely connected to what should be the main concern for software development projects (that is to say that the specifications are right), the interplay of power relationships between stakeholders can really cause a lot of damage. I am not talking only about tensions that may arise between, for example, the sales team and [...]

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I try and follow a few number of simple principles when I develop the front-end of enterprise web applications (that is to say web applications which aim is to support the processes of a particular organisation), both to inform design decisions and to avoid scope creep. The main approach I tend to follow and advocate [...]

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In recent years, ‘software developers’ have traveled quite a distance in public imagination, from spotty-faced sociopathic nerds to geek chic alpha males. Some may want my head on a spike for such an appalling short cut, but one could argue that this change in the way software engineers are represented in cultural discourse may be [...]

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What has been, in occidental culture, consensually defined as ‘the subject’, or ‘the self’, and seen as a natural, self-evident and indivisible part of the identity of human beings could be approached and understood as a historically constituted phenomenon, whose apparition and development could be investigated through an exploration of the various techniques and practices [...]

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