Lacan’s three psychoanalytic orders in software development

It occurred to me while watching a Zizek lecture [starting around minute ten] that the symbolic-real-imaginary triad of Jacques Lacan’s three psychoanalytic orders mapped directly to the three different disciplines--program management/marketing, development, and testing--used in companies developing software. The first imagines what product consumers need, how to sell it to them, and comes up with the specification of a desired "imaginary real" product. This gets passed on to the developers who must convert the specification into symbols understood by the computing machinary. They produce the "symbolic real" programming code, which the machine transforms into binary code. The resulting binary program, such as it is, is passed on to the testers who must then ascertain that it actually works, the "real real".

If that is taken as such, then product pathologies (bad software) could be understood as impedences and dissonances between the different realities. And resolving them is somewhat akin to psychoanalysis.