Preface

The purpose of software is to be a tool for us humans to help us perform tasks. A lot of software is also a replacement for something physical for which we had an opportunity to increase productivity by making it digital and also more accessible. When replacing a paper form with a digital solution, we as developers pretty much just copied the form field by field and never really thought through what we were trying to solve. This made the improvement all about the data rather than what the users were really trying to do. One of the benefits of having the forms digitally is that multiple users can see the same data at the same time and even edit it at the same time. However, since it has all been modeled as data, with often a single, large model representing it, we introduce new problems we never had in the real world on paper. Things such as transactions and data staleness make our software more complex and they never make sense at all for the user. These are technical requirements that we, as developers, have introduced to make sure the data is correct at all times.

Users are becoming better; they have new requirements based on their experience with software. Even in the enterprise, users are now demanding more of their IT systems. With the advent of the real-time Web, driven by services such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, our users are now used to different experiences that are more responsive and user friendly.