Artful Culture

In some development efforts, our goal is to deliver software that is "fun." In other words the purpose of the software is to Entertain. In most workplace environments however the goal is to deliver software that helps people get stuff done; in other words the software has Utility.

In actual cultural practice however, most developers strive to make their software a little bit of each: you want to make your software "fun enough" that folks don't get bored out of their skulls when using it while they are getting stuff done. In fact, you generally want to hit a certain sweet spot such that in addition to its Utility, what you produce is:

Culturally Appropriate, Fun, Inexpensive, Courteous, Accurate, Responsive

Unfortunately these "cultural" aspects of development are seldom if ever captured in an Analyst's "Requirements" document. They also fall a bit outside the realm of what IT management might normally consider as platform based "non- functional" requirements.

How does this culture get baked into the software then? Well it usually takes culturally aware developers.