I work on a large product that has ~300 people working on it and probably ~1000 discrete concepts. The product has been in development since 2004, and it hasn’t stopped evolving. I’m kicking off an experiment this year to try and use @dnj’s ideas to begin documenting the existing app, both for internal and external audiences, More ambitiously, I would like to try and build processes on top of this model which will facilitate more clarity when we choose to change a concept, add a new concept, or delete and remove an old concept.
If this appeals to anyone, even as a short-term consulting role, I would love to work with this community to try and bring some of these ideas into industry and see whether they can speed up product development and increase the conceptual clarity and quality of the end product!
I’d also be interested in hearing whether there are any other people looking to do this in their professional work building sophisticated software apps - while I think that this methodology seems fairly comprehensive with respect to static concepts, I think that there is more work to be done on the “dynamics” of how concepts are changed and updated over time.