Author's Note

The ideas of Holistic Programming are based an long term experience in many different areas of software development. Dissatisfaction may lead to change - I hope that my impatience with existing ways of creating software systems (and with the quality of the resulting systems) lead to something useful.

If you work on something for many years without a unique direction and at many pieces at the same time, sometimes it happens that all these pieces fall together into a single bigger picture. This currently happens to me with Holistic Programming - while the pieces are still falling, the picture is already visible to me, and it's time to talk about it.

The current work on Holistic Programming is not meant to establish a scientificly proved theory, but to find an approprite way to map experience to a methodology that must establish its validity through practical usablilty. Therefore, the feedback from practice is essential.

Many ideas mentioned here are certainly not new. Still, I didn't track the origines of the ideas, but took the freedom to merge ideas together with no respect to the original intention or their contributors. My working style required the free flow of thoughts without sticking to sources. Please know I'm very grateful for all the ideas I could learn within two decades of being a professional in this area and please accept my apologies for not honoring other's work by mentioning their names. If you find anything that sounds stupid (and I tried to make sure you will) - please blame me and only me.

This is work in progress. Please let me know your opinion. I'm still working on the best way to explain Holistic Programming, and to make it easy to understand its concepts. I'd be glad to know how my writings resonate. Please let me know your opinion or any suggestions.

Thanks for reading

Andreas Stankewitz