Comments on: ACM Article: How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design? http://www.brandonwerner.com/2008/05/17/acm-article-how-intuitive-is-object-oriented-design/ Brandon Werner writes about business, leadership and technology with special emphasis on cloud computing, concurrency, and high performance architectures Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:53:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 By: Ron Burke http://www.brandonwerner.com/2008/05/17/acm-article-how-intuitive-is-object-oriented-design/#comment-5691 Ron Burke Mon, 19 May 2008 15:20:21 +0000 http://www.brandonwerner.com/?p=265#comment-5691 Interesting article and conceptually right along with my practical experience with OOA/D. The root cause is simply that analysis of the problem domain can at times be more art than science. If we could produce an analytical algorithm that could repeatedly convert real world experience (requirements produced by subject matter experts albeit typically non-technical) to instructions a machine is capable of interpreting and executing, there would be no need for software design. Secondly, because we, as software designers, cannot agree on the right amount of abstraction, we tend to fail with too few abstractions which result in inflexible, expensive systems to maintain or create too many abstractions which result in systems that are far from the intuitive, easily understood systems that OOD intended to create. So, we really on the experience of senior developers to make critical design decisions. We presume they have acquired some understanding of the business domains in which the system is being designed. However, because each developer has unique experiences and unique value measures, critical design decisions are made differently. Some of the best designers I have ever met actually have liberally arts degrees as opposed to computer science degrees. By its nature, the concept of abstraction isn't purely empirical and thus those who have trained to presume reasoning must follow a logical path with a finite solution, tend to fail miserably at modeling the real world as viewed by non-technical, business-oriented SMEs. We objectify concepts and create generalizations and inheritance patterns which do not model accurately with the real world as viewed by SMEs. Interesting article and conceptually right along with my practical experience with OOA/D. The root cause is simply that analysis of the problem domain can at times be more art than science. If we could produce an analytical algorithm that could repeatedly convert real world experience (requirements produced by subject matter experts albeit typically non-technical) to instructions a machine is capable of interpreting and executing, there would be no need for software design. Secondly, because we, as software designers, cannot agree on the right amount of abstraction, we tend to fail with too few abstractions which result in inflexible, expensive systems to maintain or create too many abstractions which result in systems that are far from the intuitive, easily understood systems that OOD intended to create.

So, we really on the experience of senior developers to make critical design decisions. We presume they have acquired some understanding of the business domains in which the system is being designed. However, because each developer has unique experiences and unique value measures, critical design decisions are made differently.

Some of the best designers I have ever met actually have liberally arts degrees as opposed to computer science degrees. By its nature, the concept of abstraction isn’t purely empirical and thus those who have trained to presume reasoning must follow a logical path with a finite solution, tend to fail miserably at modeling the real world as viewed by non-technical, business-oriented SMEs. We objectify concepts and create generalizations and inheritance patterns which do not model accurately with the real world as viewed by SMEs.

]]> By: Daily del.icio.us for May 16th through May 18th — Vinny Carpenter’s blog http://www.brandonwerner.com/2008/05/17/acm-article-how-intuitive-is-object-oriented-design/#comment-5690 Daily del.icio.us for May 16th through May 18th — Vinny Carpenter’s blog Sun, 18 May 2008 22:00:53 +0000 http://www.brandonwerner.com/?p=265#comment-5690 [...] Brandon Werner » Blog Archive » ACM Article: How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design? - There is an incredible article that was published in the Communications of the ACM entitled “How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design?” by Irit Hadar from the University of Haifa, Israel and Uri Leron from the Israeli Institute of Technology. It goes t [...] [...] Brandon Werner » Blog Archive » ACM Article: How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design? - There is an incredible article that was published in the Communications of the ACM entitled “How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design?” by Irit Hadar from the University of Haifa, Israel and Uri Leron from the Israeli Institute of Technology. It goes t [...]

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