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Imagine a set of simple principles that could help you to understand how parts combine to become a whole, and how each part sees the whole from its own perspective. If such principles were any good, it shouldn't matter whether we're talking about humans on a team, birds in a flock, computers in a datacenter, or cogs in a Swiss watch. A theory of cooperation ought to be pretty universal, so we could apply it both to technology and to the workplace.
Such principles are the subject of Promise Theory, and the focus of this insightful book. The goal of Promise Theory is to reveal the behavior of a whole from the sum of its parts, taking the point of the parts rather than the whole. In other words, it is a bottom-up constructionist view of the world. Start Thinking in Promises and find out why this discipline works for documenting system behaviors from the bottom-up.
About the author
Mark Burgess is associate professor at Oslo University College, Norway, and a member of SAGE, USENIX and the IEEE. He is an internationally respected scientist both in Computer Science and the Theoretical Physics and has won various prizes for his work on Computer Immunology and GNU cfengine. He was recently awarded The SAGE 2003 Professional Contribution Award, "For groundbreaking work in systems administration theory and individual contributions to the field".
Summary
The goal of Promise Theory is to reveal the behavior of a whole from the sum of its parts, taking the point of the parts rather than the whole. In other words, it is a bottom-up constructionist view of the world. Start Thinking in Promises and find out why this discipline works for documenting system behaviors from the bottom-up.
