Sunday, August 31, 2003

Problems with Use Case Driven Development

My former colleague Stephen Palmer makes a good point in his FDD Blog that using Use Cases as the control point and management metric can lead to hidden scope creep. Poor quality management metrics lead to poor quality management decisions and ultimately result in a bad working environment and unhappy software engineers. It is necessary to measure something which truly reflects the size and effort required to deliver a software project.

Saturday, August 30, 2003

Microsoft UML

I have mixed feelings over this eWeek story about Microsoft extending UML and the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture in Longhorn. On the one hand, it is good to see Microsoft finally get religion on analysis and design and on the other hand it is worrying that the nascent UML 2.0 standard will be splintered by the forces of Redmond.

In some respects the OMG have only themselves to blame. The UML 2.0 and the UML MOF were partly designed by the vendors in the OMG to encourage embrace and extend behavior - hence, the anonymous spokesman quoted really only has himself and his colleagues to blame.

For some - the gurus of object modeling who care - the broadening of the market to include Microsoft should be a boon. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out in 2005.

Sunday, August 24, 2003

New Agile Management Blog

With just 4 weeks to go before my book finally appears, I’m preparing to make an effort to publicize it. I will be publishing my thoughts on software development management, agile processes, the Theory of Constraints, Lean Software Development and Feature Driven Development, here in this weblog.

I see this as a “Joel on Software” for the Fortune 1000. As the site tagline says Management Science for Software Engineering.

For those of you that care, the site is published using CityDesk from FogCreek Software. The original layout was produced in Dreamweaver and the graphics were done in Photoshop. As ever Homesite is an essential HTML editor when it’s necessary to get under the hood and clean up the HTML.

I hope to migrate uidesign.net over to CityDesk in the near future and start a 2nd blog about interaction architecture and all things UI.

Friday, August 22, 2003

Lean UI Design with Statecharts at ForUse2003

Come and see Brian O’Byrne and David Anderson co-present in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, this fall, at ForUse 2003

Abstract

Lean UI development in Feature Driven Development is achieved through right-first-time implementation of the interaction designer’s intent using David Harel’s Statechart notation to model the interaction design. Statechart notation can be directly mapped to an MVC Type-II architecture and Mediator Pattern. With a few minor extensions Statechart notation can be used to model complex application behavior such as exception handling and transactions. Statecharts can be mapped into UI Features for tracking using an FDD Knowledge Base. The Statechart can be drawn using a UML modeling tool, and imported into the JStateMachine engine which implements a table driven Mediator and Command pattern system in either a Web Servlet or JFC (Swing) environment. The result is reduced variation in UI development and precise implementation of the interaction designer’s intent. JStateMachine (an application framework) validates the runtime code against the original interaction model insuring accurate runtime implementation of the UI design.

Readers of agilemanagement.net are eligible for a $100 discount off the regular registration fee for the 2nd International Conference on Usage Centered Design - ForUse2003. An additional $50 discount is available when registering for the conference and any tutorial.

To receive your discount of up to $150 simply type the words “uidesign.net discount” in the Special Instructions field on the registration form.

Your discount will not show up automatically, as the ForUse website is not so sophisticated but your discount will have been registered and will be deducted from the fee for each applicant in the registration.

I hope to see you in New Hampshire in October.

Sunday, August 03, 2003

Download the Book Cover

Agile Management for Software Engineering
- Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results

Prentice Hall have authorized me to circulate the book cover (front and back sides) in PDF form. Download Agile Management cover (PDF 706K).