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What factors explain the nature of software?

I sometimes find myself asked to give advice on how organisations should go about creating software, but often my advice doesn’t gel with those who sought it. Sometimes that’s because only one answer was ever considered acceptable; sometimes I am ignorant of important wider context and my answer is unworthy of consideration.

When we’re disagreeing with others about some aspect of software, we tend to focus on concrete factors we can easily define and argue about: choice of programming language, approaches to testing, file name conventions, and the like . Two reasonable people can easily differ over whether adding (or removing) a given soft constraint is a good or bad idea, because so much of what each side is thinking about resides in a fantasy world that we struggle to explain to others. Ultimately, I hope that by naming these factors, and explaining as best I can what I mean by them, that they might help future conversations between people of good will who are trying to deal with the many challenges involved in creating software.

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