The Holographic Principle says that a full description of a volume of space is encoded in the surface that bounds it. This arises from black hole thermodynamics, where the black hole entropy increases with its surface area, not its volume. Everything there is to know about the black hole’s internal content is on its boundary.

Software components have boundaries that are defined by interfaces, which encapsulate everything an outsider needs to know to use it. Everything about its interior is represented by its surface at the boundary. It can be treated like a black box.

Robert Oldershaw’s research on The Self Similar Cosmological Paradigm recognizes that nature is organized in stratified hierarchy, where every level is similar. The shape and motions of atoms is similar to stellar systems. Similarities extend from the stellar scale to the galactic scale, and beyond.

Managing complexity greatly influences software design. Stratified hierarchy is familiar to this discipline.

At the atomic level, we organize our code into units. Each unit is a module with a boundary, which exposes its interface that governs how clients interact with this unit. The unit’s implementation is hidden behind this boundary, enabling it to undergo change independently of other units, as much as possible.

We build upon units by reusing modules and integrating them together into larger units, which themselves are modular and reusable in the same way. Assembly of modules into integrated components is the bread and butter of object-oriented programming. This approach is able to scale up to the level of an application, which exhibits uniformity of platform technologies, programming language, design metaphors, conventions, and development resources (tools, processes, organizations).

The next level of stratification exists because of the need to violate the uniformity across applications. However, the similarity is unbroken. We remain true to the principles of modular reuse. We continue to define a boundary with interfaces that encapsulate the implementation. We continue to integrate applications as components into larger scale components that themselves can be assembled further.

Enterprises are attempting to enable even higher levels of stratification. They define how an organization functions and how it interfaces with other organizations. This is with respect to protocols for human interaction as well as information systems. Organizations are integrated into business units that are integrated into businesses at local, national, multi-national, and global scales. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has demonstrated how entire enterprises exhibit such modular assembly.

This same pattern manifests itself across enterprises and across industries. A company exposes its products and services through an interface (branding, pricing, customer experience) which encapsulates its internal implementation. Through these protocols, we integrate across industries to create supply chains that provide ever more complex products and services.

Julian Barbour wrote the book titled “The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics” [http://www.platonia.com/ideas.html]. He explains how our failure to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory is because of our ill-conceived preoccupation with time as a necessary component of such a theory. According to Machian Dynamics, a proper description of reality is composed of the relationships between real things, not a description with respect to an imaginary background (space and time). Therefore, all you have is a configuration of things, which undergoes a change in arrangement. The path through this configuration-space is what we perceive as the flow of time.

We apply this very model of the universe in configuration management.

Software release management is a configuration management problem. The things in configuration-space are source files. A path through configuration space captures the versions of these source files relative to each other as releases of software are built. Our notion of time is with respect to these software releases.

Enterprise resource management in the communications industry involves many configuration management problems in various domains. We normally refer to such applications as Operations Support Systems.

In network resource management, the configuration-space includes devices and other resources in the network, their connectivity, and the metadata (what is normally called a “device configuration” which needs to be avoided in the context of this discussion for obvious reasons) associated with that connectivity arrangement.

In service resource management, the configuration-space includes services, their resource allocations, and the subscription metadata (what is normally called a “service configuration” which needs to be avoided in the context of this discussion for obvious reasons) or “design”.

Such applications have a notion of configuration-space, because such systems cannot operate in a world that is limited to its dependence on a background of space and time. We need to be able to travel backward and forward in time arbitrarily to see how the world looked in the past from the perspective of a particular transaction. These applications enable users to hypothesize many possible futures. Perhaps only one of which is brought into reality through a rigorous process of analysis, design, planning, procurement, construction, and project management. Reality is always from the perspective of the observer, and one’s frame of reference is always somewhere on the path in configuration-space.

Engineering is applied science. Some people believe that software engineering is applied computer science. In a limited sense, it is. But software is not entirely separated from hardware. Applications are not entirely separated from processes. Systems are not entirely separated from enterprises. Corporations are not entirely separated from markets. For this reason, I believe what we do is not software engineering at all. It is not limited to applied computer science. Our engineering discipline is actually applied cosmology.