Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!psuvax1!psuvm!uh2
From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: What's a methodology?
Message-ID: <89291.161913UH2@PSUVM.BITNET>
Date: 18 Oct 89 20:19:13 GMT
References: <910@gorath.cs.utexas.edu> <135300011@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 41

In article <135300011@p.cs.uiuc.edu>, johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu says:
>
>This is an incorrect impression.  People have been building large
>object-oriented systems successfully.  This indicates that they must
>have some sort of methodology, since large systems cannot be built
>successfully without one.  The problem is to determine their methodology.

True, but what if their "methodology" implicitly includes that two or
three of the lead programmer/designer/analyst types happen to be really,
really, really smart?  The existance of successful projects is not proof
that a set of teachable skills and procedures exists for other people.

>What is a methodology?  A programming methodology is a way of programming.

Yeah, but we need non-programming methodologies, too.  I am thinking of
Analysis and Design, User Needs specification, and particularly Project
Management.  For example, we need a way to estimate how much money
we've spent so far, and how much more we are going to have to spend, and
we need to be able to compute those estimates at periodic intervals.
Furthermore, we need a way to bring new staff up to speed when our lead
programmer gets the dream job at Commodore, and his two most-likely
successors die in the car crash on the way back from helping him move.

  A note:   In an Analysis and Design course I teach, the CS students
often eventually comment:

    Gee.  It never occurred to me before that someone has to decide
    what programs need to be written, and who should write them.  I
    always just sort of took the program as a given.

A problem I see with the OO Anything is that it blurs some of the traditional
distinctions that the bean counters used to use.

Another note:

Shouldn't it be "method"?  A discussion of methods might qualify as
"methodology".

Another note:

B# over high C