The key to building capability is to learn new skills and processes through incremental trial-and-error. However, this works best when changes can be tracked and controlled and winning processes repeated exactly and made ready for scaling up. Relying on written documents for people to follow is a fool’s errand because people get tired and make mistakes; people would rather be the expert and not follow a checklist and then they make mistakes. The creativity of people should be the source of change but the procedure of the day should be captured in code…

A process written into working software is the ultimate document

This is why:

• Infrastructure as Code is a best practice in cloud engineering
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is the best way to deliver software and automatically deploy it.
• Automated regression test cases are the best way to avoid repeating past software bugs

Tangible Systems

These ideas can be replicated in physical processes. Software that make things happen in the physical world.

Examples of Tangible Systems:

• Amazon’s warehouses have robots to move stock to-and-from shelves.
• 3D Printers for low-scale manufacturing

Tangible Interaction Design

Tangible systems incorporate tangible interaction design.

Tangible interactions are physical input devices that feed signals into digital user experiences for better and more intuitive systems. Examples are:

• Virtual Reality - headsets and tracking sensors allow immersive experiences
• VR design tools - Tilt Brush
• Mixed Reality tools - Microsoft Hololens
• Touch screens