Replying to LO25456 --
Responding to an invitation from At:
> By the way, Dwig, you yourself are deeply involved with computer software.
> Have you already become aware of the systematics of software? At what
> phase of the evolution of software systematics would you reckon the
> computer industry is at present?
The software community (I can't speak knowledgably about the hardware
side) has gone through a number of exercises in systematics, involving all
three phases. (The flowchart, mentioned in a couple of followup messages,
was an early attempt to systematize the process of computation. It's
still occasionally used, but has been supplanted by a variety of more
effective notations.)
Recently, there has been a battle of "methodologies" offering systematic
"solutions" to the problem of software design. (One interesting
characteristic of many of these is that they employ several
categorisations to capture different aspects of the problem -- in effect,
a fourth phase.) The winner (somewhat inappropriately called the Unified
Modeling Language), by trying to cover all situations, has become so
formal, complicated and awkward that it's gradually being marginalized.
Instead, developers are tending to turn to more organic approaches, such
as design patterns.
More interesting to this list, I think, is that researchers in this area
have for some time tried to develop a systematics of the development
process itself, and of the organizations that do development. More
recently, considerable practical progress has been made under the name of
"process improvement" (although the effective improvements always involve
much more than process). When I have enough free time and energy, I plan
to offer a description of the Software Engineering Institute's Capability
Maturity Model, viewed as a systematics of learning organizations.
Best regards to all,
--Don Dwiggins "All models are false, d.l.dwiggins@computer.org but some are useful" -- George Box, "Statistics for Experiments"
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