The Role of Abstractions

by Jens Coldewey

Software development is about building abstractions, right? We try to understand the customers and build abstract domain models out of their concepts and ideas; out of that we build new abstractions named code, an abstract virtual machine interprets this code, and during the interpretation it uses another abstraction -- the database schema -- to store the information, and so on. After working with software for more than 20 years in university and industry, I thought I knew at least the core rules of abstraction. I found I was wrong when I met Dave West, an agile consultant and anthropologist and learned from him about the different types of abstractions anthropologists talk about: