Collaborative Software Design

front matter

forewords

I was lucky. Early in my software engineering career, I worked on teams where collaborative modeling and collective reasoning were the norm. Whenever we didn’t know what to do, we whiteboarded. Sometimes, we were a group of engineers solving a technical problem. More often, we were a cross-functional group that included business and product people, technology implementers, software users, UX designers, a vendor or two, and/or subject matter experts from other teams.

Thinking well together, synthesizing expertise, and learning from each other were critical to our success. We understood, from painful experience, that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” This doesn’t mean that people make inaccurate models. This means ...