The invisibility of software.

Rosenberg speculates that the invisibility of software makes it more difficult to design it in a reliable manner as it (supposedly) happens in the physical world:

As we have seen, software sometimes feels intractable because it is invisible. Things that we can't see are difficult to imagine, and highly complex things that we can't see are very difficult to communicate . But invisibility isn't the only issue. We can't see electricity or magnetism or gravity, but we can reliably predict their behavior for most practical purposes. Yet simply getting a piece of software to behave consistently so that you can diagnose a problem often remains beyond our reach.

(Rosenberg: p. 275)

Since he discusses this in the context of GUI programming, it automatically triggered an idea in my mind: would it help if we were to build Shockwave Flash mockups? Would that make software more and visible and, at the very least, help understand the way the different GUI components interact with eachother? It may be worht a try. Obviously, I don't think it would be of any help when it comes to the internal logic of a program, but it may be of some use in the design of the graphical front-end, especially when it comes to obtaining some quick up-front input from the customers.