Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson
From: johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: What's a methodology?
Message-ID: <135300012@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 89 11:10:00 GMT
References: <161913@<89291>
Lines: 31
Nf-ID: #R:<89291:161913:p.cs.uiuc.edu:135300012:000:1471
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson    Oct 19 06:10:00 1989


I said
>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.

UH2@PSUVM.BITNET said
>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.

The point I was trying to make was the best way to develop a set of
teachable skills and procedures is probably to study how sucessful
people do it.  Like all research approaches, this might not succeed,
but it seems much more likely to succeed then the purely theoretical,
"let's invent a methodology" approach that seems too common.

If you agree with me then you will find one of the papers at OOPSLA'89
very interesting, because it studied how Smalltalk programmers did
design.  The authors were psychologists, not programmers.

UH2@PSUVM.BITNET said
>Shouldn't it be "method"?  A discussion of methods might qualify as
>"methodology".
I agree completely, but unfortunately the CS community seems to have
decided that a "methodology" is a way of doing something, not the
study of ways of doing something.

Ralph Johnson -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign