Context I: Individual/Founder

Context Description

The Individual/Founder context represents the bare minimum requirements of delivering digital value: one or two founders of a startup, or an R&D team with high autonomy. What are the minimum essential concerns they must address to develop and sustain a product in a digital environment? There is little or no concern for process or method. Approaches and practices are opportunistic and tactical, driven by technical choices such as programming language, delivery pipeline, and target execution platform.

In this context, the guidance must strike a fine balance between being too applied and technical, versus being too abstract and theoretical. In the interest of not becoming outdated, much existing guidance opts for the latter, seeking to provide generic guidance applicable to all forms of technology. However, this approach encounters issues in topics such as Configuration Management, which is challenging to abstract from platform and technology particulars. There is no definitive solution to this problem, but the DPBoK Standard in general should be somewhat more tolerant of real-world examples reflecting actual digital systems practices, while not becoming overly coupled to particular languages, tools, or frameworks. Being technology-agnostic ultimately may not be possible.