Socio-Technical Seeing

In conversations about software development, I often ask people whether they’ve heard of Conway’s Law. It’s a doorway to a richer conversation. We can talk about the dynamics of design — how our environment affects us as designers and how the things that we design become part of that environment in a broad feedback loop. Without this perspective, there’s so much that is puzzling about software development. Often things don’t go as planned. We blame people and processes because we miss the int...