Prologue
What the Mess Is and How We Got into It
An analogy isn’t the same thing as being the same thing.
—The Economist
There’s a famous cartoon in IT circles1 (figure 1) that shows a succession of swings, as specified in the project request, as explained by the systems analyst, as built by the programmers, and so on. None of them could actually work, and all of them look entirely ridiculous.
FIGURE 1 An application development metaphor.
Except, that is, for the last panel of the cartoon, which shows what the users really wanted.
It shows a tire, ...
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