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Rubber ducks, nightmares, and unsaturated predicates: proto-scientific schemata are good for agile

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Published:17 October 2010Publication History
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Abstract

Fine-grain case studies of scientific inquiry, lessons from linguistics on metaphoric thinking, the epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce, recent work on architectural image-schemata, along with the computer world's own theorist, Peter Naur, all suggest that software developers (frequently dulled and desiccated from overdosing on 'Cartesian' methodologies) could benefit from imbibing a little 'mysticism' not the wave-your-hands woo-woo kind but the more ineffable hunch and gut side of human cognition. Scholarly publications in their final polished forms rarely admit that stories, jokes, eroticism, and dreams were the fertile seeds that germinated into 'serious' results. This essay looks to these 'closet' sources, non-reductionist, non-self conscious, metaphorical, aformal modes of thought as the salvation of a profession gone awry. It is notably proto-scientific image-schemata that retain our attention as a pragmatic tool for improving the fecundity of Agile methodology, at its roots, so to speak. The necessary context is provided by Peter Naur's fundamental insights about software development as 'theory building' coupled with an elaboration of the Agile concept of storytelling.

References

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 45, Issue 10
      OOPSLA '10
      October 2010
      957 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/1932682
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        OOPSLA '10: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
        October 2010
        984 pages
        ISBN:9781450302036
        DOI:10.1145/1869459

      Copyright © 2010 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 17 October 2010

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