It's been on my mind that software engineering practices are more about tribal wisdom than they are about rigorous empirical studies. For example "Agile" and "OOP" came to dominate the field even though there's no evidence for them and some people think they're bad.

So that got me wondering: if the practices are not evidence-based, how do I know I am doing the best practices? Maybe the tribe next-door does better practices than me? Wait, who's the tribe next-door? I don't even know that!

So now we have to go meta and I think a good first step is to get a map of the various software tribes that are out there.

I looked for it but haven't been able to find analyses of the meta field of software engineering. I'd like to see how people, ideologies and thought movements shaped the field of software engineering over its whole history (if you have recommendations please comment).

So instead I fell back on LLMs and generated this map of software tribes, hope you find it useful :) you can click on an hexagons to show more details on the tribe.