Nobody Could Count Beans Like IBM

Posted by Rick DeNatale Sun, 02 Sep 2007 20:52:00 GMT

In my thirty-two year career at IBM, I can’t begin to count how many times I was bothered by the IBM software development process.

When I started, in 1974, I found myself trying to swim under the waterfall. Everything hinged on “Requirements Documents,” “Initial Functional Specs,” “Design Reviews,” etc. Managers were constantly wanting line of code estimates. Far more effort was wasted on process rather than progress. Sometimes the process overhead was fatal. My first project at IBM was part of IBMs major initiative in the 1970s to replace the IBM/370 with a new system called “FS”. One of my heroes at the time was John Sowa who worked in the architecture department and whose role seemed to be the resident iconoclast. In one of his memorable memos available on his web site, John made the observation that the system architecture specification comprised fifteen registered IBM confidential documents, each with an individual need to know. A fact which effectively prevented anyone in the company from understanding the system and its problems.

So, it should be no surprise that I came to an appreciation of what are now called agile methods, early on in my career, and fought for the processes and technologies which enable agility inside IBM, and evangelized such approaches to IBM customers.

Fred George was one of my allies during part of this struggle. Fred was a middle-level IBM manager who came to the IBM lab in Cary, NC about the time we started using Smalltalk, and I was developing a prototype application development tool which morphed into VisualAge. I worked in Fred’s organization and claim influencing him on dynamic OO technology, and agile methods.

Fred now works for ThoughtWorks, and blogs about agile methods. Recently he has been writing about how to push back against bean-counting. I get the sense that Fred shared many of my frustrations with the old IBM process.

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Another Take on Design Patterns

Posted by Rick DeNatale Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:48:00 GMT

Most programmers these days are familiar with, or at least aware of the now classic “Gang of Four” book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

One of the recurring arguments about design patterns is how they relate to individual programming languages. The “Gang of Four,” Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, were by majority, proponents of strongly typed languages. Ralph was the sole representative of Smalltalk and the rest of the dynamic object oriented languages. As a result, The GOF book had and has more resonance with the C++ community and it’s successors. Although there are some Smalltalk examples in the book, many of the patterns express things which are easier, and in some cases unnecessary to express in a dynamically typed language. I find this a bit ironic, since the whole patterns movement seems to have started when Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck, two of the best known Smalltalkers, discovered the work of architect Christopher Alexander and thought that his approach to building and municipal design could be translated to the design of software.

As I was browsing today, I was reminded that there is another “Design Patterns” book, “The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion” by Sherman Alpert, Bobby Woolf, and Kyle Brown. Which might be of interest to not just Smalltalkers but also Rubyists, since it approaches the subject from they dynamic language point of view. It’s not easy to find, but Amazon has a few copies in stock.

Sherm was one of the researchers in the IBM User Interface Institute which was housed in the same building where John Vlissides and Richard Helm of the “GOF” worked, the IBM Watson Research center in Yorktown Heights, NY. I spent quite a bit of time with Sherman and the rest of the UI institute team under John T. Richards back in the late-1980s to early 1990s. Bobby and Kyle were OO consultants, who I also knew through Knowledge Systems Corp.

You never know what you might learn from the old Smalltalkers.

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