RE: OO and Procedural Work Units (was switch string)

On 03/08/2001 at 08:14:23 AM, owner-java400-l@midrange.com wrote:
Fred,

I heard somewhere that IBM rely heavily on CRC cards during their OOD. As
someone who is fairly new to OOD and UML, can you give me a "real" world
feel of the relevance of use cases and the like.
--- end of excerpt ---


Oh-ho! Time to offend some OO purists....

First some caveats about this post:

IBM is a big place, there's lots of diversity.
AND
as I said before. I'm NOT a purist
AND
I get touchy about this, because sometimes
around here, people want to do every aspect of
design up front and end up taking years to
get something out the door.... 8-)


So...
I don't buy into that level of development at all.

I consider this the typical example of Brad's original
"work units" post (far too expensive for the payback).
Also, EVERY tool I've ever seen to do this is really
bad-awful-nasty in its usability.

I've not gone through formal OO development education
or classes (well 2 or 3, but nothing I consider the kind of
serious class that makes your head hurt).

I do all my OO modeling on text editor, paper, in my head
and directly in code.

I immediately build simple frameworks that actually run and
represent a skeleton of the final product.
I slice/dice/throwaway/recreate those object infrastructures
repeatedly as required.
I typically develop testcases in conjunction with
each iteration.
The testcases stick around for each iteration, and
more complex ones get added.

Why?
I do this because the biggest payback for success
is to actually have something running and I
get paid for solutions, not design. ;-)

Developers dependant on my stuff can IMMEDIATELY
start using some low function services (I DO
spend a bit more time on interfaces so those
remain relatively stable).

The product reaches full function gradually as
it is tweaked or shredded repeatedly at each
iteration.

Often, you realize that when you think you're 2/3
of the way through the product, your dependancies
are all met and you can just spit-shine the rest
and stop.

I've done this from the beginning of my career, and
I've always found that it works better than what I've
seen being used around me.

As Dennis Miller says:
 "That's just my opinion... I could be wrong"



"The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society
  is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine, and
  something like mathematics, and something like language, and
  something like thought, and art, and information...
  but software is not in fact any of those other things."
Bruce Sterling - The Hacker Crackdown

Fred A. Kulack  -  AS/400e  Java and Java DB2 access, Jdbc, JTA, etc...
IBM in Rochester, MN  (Phone: 507.253.5982   T/L 553-5982)
mailto:kulack@us.ibm.com   Personal: mailto:kulack@bresnanlink.net
AOL Instant Messenger: Home:FKulack  Work:FKulackWrk

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