Several studies have shown that there are some difficulties in trying to
capture discussion in specific interaction patterns such as IBIS. The major
difficulty appears to be an unwillingness of participants to commit to
structure too early.
My experience suggests that any categorization scheme needs to supply one or
more ‘miscellaneous’ bins in order to be flexible enough to work well. E.g.,
IBIS need a ‘comment’ option and probably an ‘information’ option in
addition to its current choices. Both comments (my personal input), and
information (from other sources) may not be fully categorized or separated
into concerns when they are generated, which is why they don’t fall into any
of the predefined categories.
It follows that it must be possible to rearrange (refactor, anneal) the
information in such a system after the initial entry.
David Parnas wrote a paper called “A rational Design Process: How and Why to
Fake It” in which he points out that no real system was ever built strictly
top down in a single pass, but that we can create a documentation set that
is what it would have been had we built it that way. This is the way
mathematics is presented in any good textbook – as an orderly progression of
thought, which is quite different from the way it actually happened.
I believe that systems such as IBIS are far more useful if they have this
flavor of ‘this is how the discussion would have gone if we knew at the
beginning what we know at the end’. Don’t make the initial input into the
discussion structure too rigid, and provide ways to reorganize the input
into the structure that hindsight shows to be what we would have liked to
have been smart enough to do in the first place.
Thanks,
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
DYNAMIC Alternatives <http://www.dynalt.com/>
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