From list-errors.900002452.8752.901141167.009.0.1@boing.topica.com Thu Jun 14 14:12:05 2001 X-UIDL: a313d7afa675d7517a45fd1cef0af3f7 Return-Path: Received: from outmta027.topicadirect.com (outmta027.topicadirect.com [64.209.191.211]) by amber.ccs.neu.edu (8.10.0.Beta10/8.10.0.Beta10) with SMTP id f5EIC4f29307 for ; Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:12:04 -0400 (EDT) To: Software Development Show Daily From: Software Development Subject: Software Development's Show Daily: Day Two at UML World. Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:00:00 -0700 Message-ID: <8752.900002452.746306408-738719082-992541625@topica.com> X-Topica-Id: <992541605.svcapn002.4565.1000108> X-Topica-Loop: 900002452 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Status: RO Content-Length: 6807 Welcome to Software Development magazine's daily news update from UML World! This e-mail newsletter is a free service for subscribers to Software Development magazine and SD Online. If you do not wish to get this newsletter, please follow the unsubscribe directions at the bottom of this message. ----------------- The Horse's Mouth Kent Beck: Eschew heavy planning and live in the moment ----------------- According to Extreme Programming (XP) guru Kent Beck, software is only now beginning to shake free of the "scientific" management concepts introduced in the early 20th century by Frederick Taylor, the first industrial engineer. Without additional capital expenditure, Taylor could double or triple a factory's output. Time studies, separate planning departments, task assignments, quality control and differential pay rates are familiar concepts, but Taylor "had a little problem with retention," said Beck in his UML World keynote on Tuesday, June 12, 2001 in New York City. Things have changed since then, however: "Today, instead of the differential rate, developers have stock options." In the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming, the father of Total Quality Management, took the first big step away from Taylorism, explained Beck. Indeed, modern manufacturing looks very different from its Victorian origins: Workers follow a product through the plant, keep their own statistics, design and improve their own process, and have more egalitarian reporting relationships. However, the software world, Beck claims, is still clinging to an industrial manufacturing metaphor. "There's no emphasis on maintenance. We talk about 'making' and 'shipping' products. I call this the 'spec-and-disappoint cycle.'" The solution, at least for Beck, can be found in the increasingly familiar but still controversial XP practices, including the planning game, pair programming of all production code, the constant presence of an on-site customer, simple design, writing tests before code, continuous integration with no regressions, and a 40-hour work week-- termed the "eight-hour burn," by Object Mentor's Robert Martin, an OO and XP trainer. But a conflict is erupting between those who emphasize a formal requirements- gathering, modeling and design process and those who espouse so-called "customer stories" dashed onto index cards. Beck considers the latter practice crucial in helping developers estimate the duration of a given requirement's development based on an ever-more-precise sense of the team's velocity in testing and building the software's frequent releases. Business people aren't cut out of the process, he said. Rather, they set scope, priority and dates. So how do struggling teams start up with XP, let alone any sort of repeatable process? "For some reason, I'm only called in when the atmosphere has already become horribly poisoned," laughed Beck. "The first step is to start up that heartbeat of nonstop delivery. At some point, there's a magical moment when the customer comes around and sits next to the programmers. People start looking after each other's interests." --Alexandra Weber Morales *************Advertisement************** ************************************************************************ Save up to $400 off last year's tuition! SD Web Service World, Aug 27 -31 in Boston. Offers over 130 classes & tutorials in .NET, Java, XML, C++, Design & Process, Web Services and more, plus Keynotes and Expo. Visit: www.sdexpo.com to register and use code SMAIL71. ************************************************************************ **************************************** ---------------- Evolution of UML Predicting the near and far future of modeling ---------------- If negotiating consensus in a large standards body composed of some 800 industry players sounds like fun, you'd love Cris Kobryn's job. He's spent the last six years working with the Object Management Group on the 600-page UML specification, spending every Wednesday morning in a teleconference discussing changes to the language. "Who has read the notation guide?" asked Kobryn, chief technologist for Telelogic, in his UML World 2001 talk outlining the evolution of the language. "Anyone here masochistic enough to read the semantics? Please come up afterward and see me-- we need volunteers." Describing UML as essentially recursive and mathematically elegant, Kobryn acknowledged that, for many, an understanding of not only the UML metamodel but also the metametamodel was not easily gained. "This can seem elusive, elitist and tricky, but it's basically a four-layer metamodel architecture, just like XML is a metalanguage." Take-home points from Kobryn's talk were that version 1.4 of UML, a minor revision, is now available, and the version 2.0 specification, slated for 2002, is well underway. Changes in version 1.4 include methods to specify components and collaborations and, perhaps most importantly, profiles--ways to customize and extend UML by defining stereotypes. "When UML first came out, people began putting keywords all over the place and taking license, modifying base classes in ways that didn't make any sense. It's like human language: you can add jargon, but you don't overload the base semantics by redefining what the word 'is' means," Kobryn stated, to appreciative laughter. UML 2.0 will be a more complete overhaul, he claimed, with changes anticipated in the language infrastructure and superstructure, object constraint language and diagram interchangeability (standards for placement, grouping, fonts and other aspects). Basic areas such as the puzzling nature of dependency notation, will also be clarified. "There are some experts who are confused--and I won't name names--about which way the arrows go in the dependency relationship." Further into the future, UML 3.0 may include fully executable models, visual modeling combined with visual programming, three-dimensional models that can be manipulated in cyberspace with data gloves, and tools that take advantage of the convergence of visual modeling and integrated development environments. Finally, a new programming paradigm may be on the horizon. "The object-oriented paradigm is getting a bit long in the tooth. We know that object-relational mapping is a problem. How about rule-based or component-based paradigms? I'm concerned about the dearth of creativity in our industry," Kobryn said. --Alexandra Weber Morales ************************************************************************ SD's UML World UPDATE is brought to you by CMP Media LLC, publisher of Software Development magazine. To stop receiving this newsletter, go to http://softwaredevelopment.email-publisher.com/u/?a84tUK.a89f87 ************************************************************************