View: Information Flows

In this chapter and the next one (Centers) we will discuss the anatomy of a system.

If you try to draw a picture of a system, what you will end up with is a set of parts linked by arrows indicating relationships. We can describe a typical software system using arrows that represent flows of either information or money.

Information is the lifeblood of a software system. Viewed from a certain, abstracted perspective, all any software is really doing is moving information from one place to another, merging, splitting, and transforming it along the way.

It can be argued that development of any kind is essentially a learning process and that it is primarily dependent on a network of information flows.

—Kenneth Boulding, Economics as a Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosphere)