If there's one "prescriptive" thing I find useful about the allegory that applies to software, it's thinking about how to write good documentation. A lot of en

If there's one "prescriptive" thing I find useful about the allegory that applies to software, it's thinking about how to write good documentation. A lot of engineers would write something like "this fence is made of silver oak planks cut to a length of 3 feet and fastened together aluminum wire" and while that may be useful if you have to fix the fence, for the people in the allegory it would be much more helpful to have a sign that says "this fence is here to keep cows from fouling the water in the lake behind it because 5 houses nearby use it for drinking water". If either the 5 houses or the cows are no longer there, it makes the whole system much less resistant to change.