Oddly Influenced: Recent Episodes
Brian Marick
Collaborative circles don't have a smooth trajectory toward creative breakthrough. I describe the more common trajectory. I also do a little speculation on how a circle's "shared vision" consists of goals, habits, and "anti-trigger words." I also suggest that common notions of trust or psychological safety may not be fine-grained enough to understand circle-style creative breakthroughs.
I continue to work from Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.
Mentioned
"Bright and dull cows"
Sam Kaner, Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, 1996
Brian Marick, "Seven Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out", 2008
Image credits
The image is of a route map for a particular cave complex in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, USA. There is not a nice linear path from the starting point to (any) destination. This is also true of creative work, like collaborative circles. The image is in the public domain.
An interview with Lorin Hochstein, resilience engineer and author. Our discussion was about how to handle a complex system that falls down hard and – especially – how to then prepare for the next incident. The discussion is anchored by David D. Woods' 2018 paper, “The Theory of Graceful Extensibility: Basic Rules that Govern Adaptive Systems”, which (in keeping with the theme of the podcast) focuses on a general topic, drawing more from emergency medicine than from software.
Lorin Hochstein
- Resilience engineering: Where do I start?
- Website
- Publications
- Blog
- Talks
Mentioned
- Brendan Green, "The Utilization, Saturation, and Errors (USE) method", 2012?
- How Knight Capital lost $500 million very quickly. Link and link.
- Lucy Tu for Scientific American, "Why Maternal Mortality Rates Are Getting Worse across the U.S.", 2023
- David Turner, A Passion for Tango: A thoughtful, Provocative and Useful Guide to that Universal Body Language, Argentine Tango, 2004
Correction
On pushing, pulling, and balance, A Passion for Tango says on pp. 34-5: "The leader begins the couple's movement by transmitting to his follower his intention to move with his upper body; he begins to shift his axis. The follower, sensing the intention, first moves her free leg and keeps the presence of her upper body still with the leader. [...] The good leader gives a clear, unambiguous and thoughtfully-timed indication of what he wants the follower to do. The good follower listens to the music and chooses the time to move. The leader, having given the suggestion, waits for the follower to initiate her movement and then follows her." He further says (p. 34), "As a leader acting as a follower, you really learn quickly how nasty it feels if your leader pulls you about, pushes you in the back or fails to indicate clearly enough what he wants."
Apologies. I was long ago entranced by the idea that walking is a sequence of "controlled falls". Which is true, but doesn't capture how walking is a sequence of artfully and smoothly controlled falls. Tango is that, raised to a higher power.
Credits
The episode image is from the cover of A Passion for Tango. The text describes the cover image as an example of a follower's "rapt concentration" that, in the episode, I called "the tango look".
I was a core member of what Farrell would call a collaborative circle: the four people who codified Context-Driven Testing. That makes me think I can supplement Farrell's account with what it feels like to be inside a circle. I try to be "actionable", not just some guy writing a memoir.
My topics are: what the context-driven circle was reacting against; the nature of the reaction and the resulting shared vision; how geographically-distributed circles work (including the first-wave feminist Ultras and the Freud/Fleiss collaboration); two meeting formats you may want to copy; why I value shared techniques over shared vision; how circles develop a shared tone and stereotyped reactions, not just a shared vision; and, the nature of “going public” with the vision.
Mentioned
- Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.
- Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Quoc Nguyen, Testing Computer Software, 1993.
- Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), 1863.
- context-driven-testing.com (including the principles of context-driven testing), 2001?
- Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2002.
- Association for Software Testing.
- Elisabeth Hendrickson, Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, 2012.
- Jonathan Bach, "Session-Based Test Management", 2000.
- Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain, 1972. (It's the second in a series that begins with Master and Commander.)
Four articles that demonstrate personal style:
- James Bach, “Enough About Process, What We Need Are Heroes”, IEEE Software, March 1995.
- Brian Marick, "New Models for Test Development", 1999.
- Bret Pettichord, "Testers and Developers Think Differently", 2000.
- James Bach, "Explaining Testing to THEM", 2001.
Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing and related:
- Cem Kaner, "Improving the Maintainability of Automated Test Suites", 1997. (This contains the conclusions of LAWST 1 as an appendix.)
- The LAWST Handbook (1999) and LAWST Format (1997?) describe the meeting format.
- The "Pattern Writers' Workshop" style is most fully explained in Richard P. Gabriel, Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (2002). James Coplien, "A Pattern Language for Writer's Workshops" (1997), describes writers' workshops in the "Alexandrian style" of pattern description (the one used in the seminal A Pattern Language). "Writers Workshop Guidelines" is a terse description.
Image credit
Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) describes how groups of people follow a trajectory from vague dislike of the status quo, to a sharpened criticism of it, to a shared vision (and supporting techniques) intended to displace it. The development of so-called "lightweight processes" in the 1990s can be viewed through that lens. I drag in a little discussion of binary oppositions as used in Lévi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology (1963) and later work.
Mentioned
- The first NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968
- The SAGE air-defense network
- David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, “A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It”, 1986
- The Alphabet of Ben Sira. For the story of Lilith, see this episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast: "Lilith Unfair"
- Etymology of "sinister"
- Wulf Schiefenhövel, "Biased semantics for left and right in 50 Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages", 2013
- Edsger Dijkstra, "On anthropomorphism in science", 1985
- Edsger Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", 1975 (enthusiastically)
- Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, 1980
- Peter Adamson, "Plato's Phaedo" (podcast)
- John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis, 1977
- Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 1999
Credit
The image of the screech owl is by permission of Erica Henderson. It was inspired by the "Doamurder, West Virginia (The Book of Genesis, Part 1)" episode of the Apocrypals podcast. I bought my Lilith T-shirt from their merch store, which also contains sticker versions, etc.
Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) is about how groups of people ("circles") begin with discomfort about the status quo and, after collaboration and discussion, make creative breakthroughs. It's based on six case studies. Four are circles of artists and painters, one looks at the early development of Freud's psychoanalysis, and one is devoted to a particular group of "first wave" feminist agitators.
This episode aims to tempt you to want to learn more: by summarizing two of Farrell's case studies. My original thinking was that Farrell's model of circle development would be generally applicable to software teams dissatisfied with the status quo of development and who didn't fit common models like forming-storming-norming-performing. As I dug into the details, I realized it's not as widely applicable as I'd hoped, at least without substantial customization. So the episode ends with some reasons you might not want to listen to the next one. But I hope you do!
Other sources and references
- Cem Kaner and James Bach, Context-driven testing, 2012?
- Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2001
- Donald Davidson, "Lee in the Mountains", 1938
- The "Yes, and..." rule in improvisational comedy. See also Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). Looking for links, I also noticed Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration (2015), which seems to be a more standard business book. I haven't read it.
Credits
The episode image is "Ulysses and Nausicaa" by Charles Gleyre. In theme and style, it's the kind of art the Impressionists were rebelling against.
Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning parts. To her, each software team is a symmathesy composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all of their tools.) @jessitron is another of those people who apply ideas from outside software to software, including in her role as a developer advocate at Honeycomb, a company that aims to make the workings of software visible to its developers. Were she not engaging, personable, and enthusiastic, she'd be scarily like me. This conversation is about C. Thi Nguyen's book Games: Agency as Art, whose blurb starts, "Games are a unique art form. Game designers don’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency."
Jessitron links
- jessitron.com (symmathesy)
- Mastodon
- Her calendar for observability office hours
References
- C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 2020
- Pandemic (cooperative board game), 2008
- Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019
- John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, 2010
- The "Farm to Tabor" podcast episode: "Donut science, cars, & grassfed beef", 2018
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998
In the podcast, I mentioned classic English country gardens. I riffed a bit on Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia". It "explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from 'one of the most significant contemporary playwrights' in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written." I cut the riff out because – embarrassingly – I couldn't remember the names of either the play or its author. From personal experience, I can recommend this full cast performance for a road trip. On that trip, we also listened to the Alzabo Soup podcast's multi-episode commentary.
Photo credit: me
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.
Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through. Here's a review. "Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was" is a short story that I think stands alone. I quote from the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, but I wouldn't read it first unless you're a fan of Gene Wolfe and like figuring out the backstory yourself.
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1995
Paul Feyerabend, Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, 1972.
Credits
Worker and Kolkhoz (collective farm) Woman Monument from C.K. Leung, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Although I don't dwell on it in this episode, Scott uses the Soviet collective farm as a big example of a failure of Seeing Like a State.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.
The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.dev
Credits
Satellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Mentioned
- One of Glenn's talks on engineering.
- The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good.
- Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969
- Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, 2010
- David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It", 1986.
- The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting Intellectual Property by removing a whole talk that uses a short clip is far more important than Mr. Ford's ideas.
Glenn's other recommendations:
- What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter Vincenti
- Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, by Eugene S. Ferguson
- Definition of the Engineering Method, by Billy Vaughn Koen
- A number of Henry Petroski’s books shed valuable light on the actual practice of engineering:
- To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
- Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing
- Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering
- Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design
- To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure
- Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (this is quite different from the others, but by telling the real, non-idealized tale of how so many great bridges were built — including several disastrous failures and many other near failures — this book was instrumental in helping me understand how inaccurate the common stereotype of engineering really is)
Credits
Image of double effect distillation chemical plant via Wikimedia Commons. User:Luigi Chiesa, CC BY 3.0. Cropped by Brian Marick.
Mark Seemann
- blog
- Code That Fits in Your Head, 2021
The books
- Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. Goodreads description. Or: free at the author's site.
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011
Also mentioned
- Read Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, 2006
- Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain, 2021
- George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", 1956
- Rich Hickey, "Hammock-Driven Development" (video), 2010
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia, 2014
- Poincaré's 1904 essay on creativity is described (with extensive quotes) in this article. The original source for the essay is his book The Foundations of Science, starting on page 179, a chapter titled "Mathematical Creation". The book is freely available for Kindle and in other formats via the Wayback Machine.
- Jamis Buck, Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages, 2015
- Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software, 1996. Free at the author's site.
Credits
The image of Theseus, the spaceship in Blindsight, is from a page from Peter Watts' website. The image is not marked Creative Commons, though the whole novel is, so I'm hoping Mr. Watts won't mind.
- DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011
- David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, 2021
- Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows'
- Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant,"The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds" (PDF)
- Ian Welsh, "The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred"
- Paul Feyerabend and Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001
- John T. Jost, A Theory of System Justification, 2004. Which I have not read, but I have listened to a podcast conversation with him.
- James Suzman, "Why 'Bushman banter was crucial to hunter-gatherer's evolutionary success", derived from his book Affluence Without Abundance, 2017
- Peter Freuchen, Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos, 1961
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975
Credits
Image of a veterinarian succussing a Holstein cow courtesy Dawn Marick, DVM, MS, DACVIM(LA).
- David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011
People mentioned
Einar W. Høst
- David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011
- Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000
Credits
Picture of a Kula ring gift item, Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
- The 1968 Software Engineering Conference
- An objection to the trading zone
- Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002.
- Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000
Credits
Roulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
- Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
- Wikipedia on academic genealogy
- @made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentioned
- Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, 1998
- Context-driven testing website and book
- The Agile Fusion workshop description
- People mentioned: Lisa Crispin, Ward Cunningham, Janet Gregory, GeePaw Hill, Simon Peyton-Jones
Credits
An image from an undated review of a staging of "Fiddler on the Roof". DuckDuckGo claims it's CC-licensed, but I can't tell. I'm gonna risk it.
- Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962
- Steven Law, "Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?", 2018. (Also has a picture of the Necker cube, which Kuhn also uses. Come to think of it, it might be he only uses the Necker cube, not the rabbit/duck.)
- Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970. (The proceedings of a 1965 conference on Kuhn's ideas. It cannot have been fun for Kuhn.)
Credits
Flask from DataBase Center for Life Science (DBCLS), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
Credits
Roman coin depicting the harbor at Ostia, from the title page of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff, 1912. Source unknown, but the entire book is public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
Brian Marick, An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, unfinished
Brian Marick, Lenses for the Mere Mortal: Purescript Edition, unfinished
Programming languages: Clojure, ClojureScript, Elixir, Elm, Purescript
Credits
Photo of proton-antiproton collision from UA5 collaboration, CERN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Lakatos in a nutshell
Scientists join research programmes. Research programmes are characterized by a small hard core of 2-5 postulates that guide development of theories and experiments. The hard core is not questioned from within the research programme.
To be progressive, a research program must produce a series of dramatic ("novel") predictions that are confirmed by experiment. This is in contrast to the mainstream account of science, which emphasizes that it's rational to believe in a theory only if its predictions are not (yet) refuted. Lakatos's argument is that real scientists don't abandon beliefs because they're refuted. Indeed, "theories grow in a sea of anomalies, and counterexamples are merrily ignored."
While anomalies or counterexamples are generally shelved to deal with later, some are too telling to ignore. Scientists react by producing an protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. Those are of two sorts:
- The good kind are theories in their own right that also lead to novel predictions and confirmations.
- "ad hoc" hypotheses are those purely created to defend the research programme, to explain away counterexamples. They don't lead to useful predictions.
Note that you can't tell from the outside which category a protective theory falls into. That's discovered over time.
Unlike the hard core, parts of the protective belt can be dropped or replaced.
A research programme is degenerating if:
- it does not lead to stunning new predictions (at least occasionally...);
- all its bold predictions are falsified; and
- it does not grow in steps which "follow the spirit of the programme". That most likely means that it's no longer building by finding implications of its hard core. Instead, the researchers spend their time constructing ad hoc protective theories.
A research programme can recover from degenerating and become progressive again.
The wikipedia article has more detail. It's pretty good as of this episode's publication date.
References
The standard reference is Lakatos's Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 1978, Currie & Worrell (editors). I personally found a series of Lakatos's transcribed lectures more useful for this episode. They're in For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, 1995, Motterlini (editor). Lakatos and Feyerabend were both friends and sparring partners with very different views about science. Unfortunately, Feyerabend didn't save most of Lakatos's letters, and Feyerabend's letters tend more toward gossip than debate about issues. It's quite a loss, given that Lakatos died young (age 51).
I don't mention it in the podcast, but Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, 1976, Worrall and Zaher (editors) is a wonderful book. It's a series of fictional conversations between a teacher and his students that recapitulates the history of Euler's polyhedron formula, V-E+F=2. As with his later Methodology did for science, Lakatos demonstrates that mathematics isn't just a steady accumulation of knowledge. Mathematicians don't just play the definition-theorem-proof game; they also use techniques like "monster barring". You'll be surprised by how entertaining it is.
Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, (first edition, 1950). Wikipedia article.
The Millikin oil drop experiment.
The manifesto for Agile software development.
Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change(second edition, 2004).
Edward Yourdon, Death March (first edition 1997).
My Bothered Bolsheviks are described in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power (1878-1928), 2014.
Credits
Comet Hale-Bopp image by E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab; Johannes-Kepler-Observatory, Linz, Austria, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
James Shore: website, The Art of Agile Development, AOAD book club, twitter
Mentioned
Susan Leigh Star, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept, 2010
Jeff Patton: website, story mapping articles, story mapping book, twitter
Gojko Adzic: website, book on impact mapping, impact mapping website, twitter
Diana Larson: website, twitter
Alistair Cockburn: website, twitter
Jessica Kerr: website, twitter, symmathesy
Michael Feathers: website, twitter
Miro collaboration app
Gather.town a collaboration app mimics more properties of physical space
Pictures
A Patton-style story map
An Adzic-style impact mapping
A Shore-style cluster map
A sequence diagram
Credits
Shoreline image by Flickr user dronepicr, CC BY 2.0
GuestsElisabeth Hendrickson, @testobsessed, Curious Duck Digital Laboratory
Chris McMahon, @chris_mcmahon, blog
CitationsCrafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, Elisabeth Hendrickson, 2012.
CitationsCrafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty, 1989.
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Kent Beck, 1996.
Ward Cunningham on "working the program", 2004.
The Mathematical Experience, Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, 1980.
"Elephant Talk", King Crimson, 1981 (audio).
"Hammock-Driven Development", Rich Hickey, 2010 (video).
"What is Hammock-Driven Development?", Keagan Stokoe, 2021
Credits
Image of contrasting words from Flickr user andeecollard, Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0
Recombinant DNA ("gene splicing") was a wildly successful technology in the world of cell biology. Its success gave credibility to the associated "proto-oncogene theory of cancer." The theory piggy-backed on the tool.
jUnit was a fairly successful tool in the world of Java programmers. But it was not as successful as recombinant DNA, and it was fairly unsuccessful at promoting its associated theory of test-driven design.
This episode looks at what (according to Joan Fujimura's ideas about the history of molecular biology) is required for a tool to be successful, and why jUnit's theory didn't successfully piggyback on the tool.
Sources mentioned
Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
Molecular Cloning, a Laboratory Manual (Fourth Edition), Michael R. Green and Joseph Sambrook, 2012.
“Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests”, Kent Beck and Eric Gamma.
"JUnit: A Cook's Tour", Kent Beck and Eric Gamma.
Junit Recipes: Practical Methods for Programmer Testing, J. B. Rainsberger, 2003.
XUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code, Gerard Meszaros, 2007.
My question about the adoption of TDD
When TDD arrived on the software scene around 1980, it became popular very fast. Why did it succeed so well?
I think it's because it was a combined theory and technology that hit the same "sweet spot" of intellectual infectiousness that the "proto-oncogene theory of cancer" did in the 1980's. Most of this episode is a history of the proto-oncogene theory. The next episode will look at case studies in software.
Sources:
Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997.
"Crafting science: Standardized packages, boundary objects, and 'Translation.'", Joan Fujimura, in Science as Practice and Culture, Andrew Pickering (ed.), 1992.
The Craft of Software Testing, Brian Marick, 1994. (Don't buy this book unless you need it for the unauthorized biography of me that you're writing. It's terribly out of date.)
Credits
I mention a comment from Twitter user James Thomas (@qahiccupps)
The DNA artwork is by Zephyris - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Thanks to Dawn Marick for checking the draft script.
The episode builds from the paper “Institutional Ecology, 'Translations', and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939”. It contains a brief history of how biology was changing around 1907, how scientists and collectors collaborated using "boundary objects", and how acceptance tests can be seen as boundary objects. It ends with some heretical thoughts about business alignment.
Thanks to Randy Clayton and Dawn Marick for advice about the script.