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From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: What's a methodology?
Message-ID: <89294.142407UH2@PSUVM.BITNET>
Date: 21 Oct 89 18:24:07 GMT
References: <161913@<89291> <135300012@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 33

In article <135300012@p.cs.uiuc.edu>, johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu says:
>
>
>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.

A disclaimer:  I am (or at least used to be) a social scientist, so if anyone
should agree with you, it should be the younger version of me, but...

Was structured programming invented this way?  That is, did researchers
study how successful programmers work, and then discover they used
structured programming ,or did theoreticians, using introspection, just
invent it?  I think the latter.  Likewise for just about every break through
in computing, I think.  People do it, and do it some more, til some bright
guy finally just *sees* that there is a better way to do it.  Now, it
helps if that bright guy is surrounded by a bunch of other bright guys, and
they spend a lot of effort kicking the ideas around, and they aren't under
pressure from marketing to make it user-friendly or whatever.  Sounds like
a university, I guess.

Can you imagine what Unix or Smalltalk might have looked like if they had been
designed by psychologists, sociologists ,or cultural anthropologists ,based
on studies of the way people used computers?

It has always been the case that these types of methods are best at
distinguishing between alternatives when comparing two or more cleat alterna-
tives in cases where the questions are well-formed.  Very rarely do these
methods lead to the invention of a new way of doing things.

                                                           lee