Is this for "business" software? Scientific? Crypto?
There's an old saying: Good, Fast or Cheap, pick any two. That might be relevant to drag racing (the context in which I heard it first) and irrelevant for software, but the underlying lesson, that there's inherent tension between different conceptions of "ideal" should not be lost. Picking a context for "ideal", making that explicit, and then acknowledging that compromises are necessary is necessary. Any other path will leave everyone wondering how they're going to make necessary compromises in one aspect of "ideal", without getting in trouble.
Thank you for the input. I guess I was looking for the qualities that would apply to all those areas you mentioned. In the same way that systems theory is an abstraction that hovers above many different areas of human knowledge. However, I didn't make that explicit.
Your point for compromises is very important. It's important, because you have to compromise on your way to this ideal that I wrote about.
Is this for "business" software? Scientific? Crypto?
There's an old saying: Good, Fast or Cheap, pick any two. That might be relevant to drag racing (the context in which I heard it first) and irrelevant for software, but the underlying lesson, that there's inherent tension between different conceptions of "ideal" should not be lost. Picking a context for "ideal", making that explicit, and then acknowledging that compromises are necessary is necessary. Any other path will leave everyone wondering how they're going to make necessary compromises in one aspect of "ideal", without getting in trouble.