[kazinator]

They try to prioritize their principles, but they are vague. Let's see:

> Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by building a non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive system

Okay, firstly, what is that? And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements?

What if I don't want a "self adaptive" system, whatever that is? It could be bad: self-adaptive software keeps some global state somewhere and doesn't quite ever do the same thing twice. If I require something that produces exactly the same output every time I feed it a given input, then I'm ill-served as a customer if I'm handed some self-adaptive contraption.

[edocecrous]

> what is that?

A collection of popular buzz-words in contemporary software engineering research.

> And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements?

These are never any customer's requirements. Not a sane customer, at least. Instead, they are (conjectured, probably correctly, to be) generalizations of sufficiently many customers' requirements.

But you're correct -- most customers don't want or need any of those things (except non-linearity. But every piece of software everywhere has this spades.)

[the_af]

I agree they seem like buzz-words, but not from software engineering research. They look entreprisey or startup friendly buzz-words to me.

[matt4077]

Or you could read the book. I haven't (summer reading list, again). But it's got a 20-page bibliography, and appendices with all sorts of greek letters that define, well, a lot. I think.

The Black Swan was also by Taleb and probably the most influential finance book of the last 20 years, plus a great read for anybody thinking in 'systems'. It'd give the idea the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes words have no meaning, sometimes it takes some work.

[edocecrous]

The parent didn't ask what antifragile means. The parent asked what non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive means, especially when taken as requirements for a software system.

Reading Taleb's book to answer that question is probably a lot like trying to extract evolved dogma out of a religious text because each of those words has taken on a life and meaning of their own in SE literature. You can probably eventually get close, but you're better off just reading a few SE papers on those topics and inferring the authors' intended meaning.

[kazinator]

A URL to a git repo showing the non-linear, self-adaptive piece of software would be more effective.