Moldable Development in a nutshell
Everything about software systems is representable as data. Data does not have an intrinsic shape. It's just data. But, to reason about it, we, humans need a shape. That shape is provided by our tools.
First, this means that tools are essential in software engineering. But, what kind of tools should they be?
Consider this basic example of six objects viewed through the lens of a typical view showing the variables and corresponding values. This generic view is widespread. While its genericity makes it applicable to all objects, it also makes it bland. Distant. Uncommunicative.
Now, let's change the shapes. Same objects. Different shapes.
These are not generic shapes. They are custom made. They only make sense for the objects they depict. Their specificity makes them humane and helps you engage.
Everything in a software system, including individual objects, can be viewed from multiple perspectives, and we believe the environment should accommodate all these. We say it should be moldable.
Glamorous Toolkit is built from the ground up to be a moldable development environment. For example, here is how the inspectors for our six objects look like. They are distinct, contextual.
Changing the way we see our systems can have a dramatic impact on how we reason about our systems and it is applicable systematically through all our tools.
We are developing Glamorous Toolkit to show concretely how this applies throughout the whole development cycle all the way from how we depict a single object to how we can steer agile architecture, or how we can explain whole systems to non-technical people.