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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Since I had a bit of success with my article about adopting a poststructuralist perspective towards user experience (Indeed, 2 people commented! amazing: Thank you Kshitiz and mc), I thought it would be nice to go a bit deeper in the subject, by briefly evoking some of the main notions behind poststructuralist theory and by [...]

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I think that it would be interesting to explore the theoretical ramification of an interpretation of the notion of user experience from a ‘radically’ poststructuralist point of view, that would put the emphasis not only on the subjective experience of users of interactive systems, but also on the subjective experience of the people who actually [...]

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Here are the slides from a talk I did in London at dev8d, where I tried to focus on the practical aspects of things. I hope some developers around here find it interesting! Dev8D Presentation Pascal Belouin View more presentations from Pascal Belouin.

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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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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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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 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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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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