Читать книгу Silver Bullets Toolkit - Константин Константинович Берлинский, Konstantin Berlinskii - Страница 3

This book was written in order to collect in a single whole those things that I call “gold crumbs of knowledge”, dispersed in the great number of sources such as Internet, literature and some kind of folk arts.

Phrases like “Two heads are better than one” or principle “divide et impera”, known as early as in the Rome Empire, contributed in the development of program engineering more than both Microsoft and IBM.

After reading any book, article or message on the forum I was always interested in what useful I could get from this source exactly. Does it contain any useful thought unknown for me before? There were luckily to be new ideas in the most cases, but unfortunately they were diluted with secondary information that confused the issue.

Therefore after reading the next work I tried as far as possible to make up a summary with a list of the main ideas (unknown or not very obvious by that moment for me) that the author tried to express.

For example, here is the following result I have got after reading the book [3]:

1. The business-process description in text is much smaller than graphic format (it’s really truth – the greatest working problem with diagram was that the printer did not support A3 and A2 formats).

2. Customers will read the text, understand and sign it (admit or express their claims) faster than learn UML (for example, I spent a lot of time for explaining the include/extended link on usecase diagrams.

3. A new employee will easily learn how to write the text in the format of Cockburn’s usecases than make him use UML and the supporting product correctly (for example, Rational Rose – graphics editor that leaves much to be desired).

4. Good classification of aims – you should always work on the same goal level. The level comes up if you ask the question “Why?”, and comes down if you ask “How?” (this is the great art to be on the needed goal level – the diagrams become smaller and more general or too big and detailed).

5. An excellent, intuitive comprehensible pattern of use case description (main scenario from 10 steps without “if” + main scenario extending + additional information).

6. An excellent idea concerning methods of multivariate analysis of the requirements collected (for example, with the help of electronic worksheet) – use of sorting, grouping in different attributes (importance, term, module, role)

7. And finally, I consider that the most important thing is that the lower the goal standard is, the less useful and obvious diagrams are.

It follows from this the idea of dividing the task between different CASE-tools: for creating diagrams of higher level (business process scenario, schemes of traffic, diagram of main document mode, collaboration between program module) to use tools effectively applied for drawing diagrams, connections between them (Rational Rose, MS Visio), but for more detailed description to use Cockburn’s use cases.

I must confess that writing this book was a quite risky business: every time I can get a stab in the back from someone with 20 years of experience in development who devoted much time of his life for promoting the X methodology and can hear the phrase like “you should make as many projects as I did and then you would offer the solutions of yours”.

My general age does not exceed 24 (including only 3 years of commercial software development experience) and I have 5 embodied projects behind myself. According to “common standard” I should wait for my 40s and then express my thoughts in written.

But to hell with all these rules! You should live here and now and if you get the chance to do more than you can, do it immediately. There is little probability that you will lift a big iron case (see the movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest). But you will not ever succeed if you do not make at least an effort.

I am really interested in my profession and every day long I try to make my life (and professional activity) better and happier as more as possible. Of course, it is foolish to think that writing something like book, article or something like “advertisement to myself” will increase my or somebody else’s education (more details see in the article [2]). But nevertheless it has the sense.

Release of the book will enlarge my “virtual learning” (in other words what attitude the potential employers will have towards me). All of these things (meeting new persons, receiving new information) extend fair chances to increase my real education i.e. real benefits that I bring to the projects which I take part in. Enlarging real education incites me to publish new materials. And so on.

By this book I would like to prove (most of all to myself) that our world is much easier than it may seems for the first glace. It is possible to succeed in spite of those obstacles that can be encountered in our way.

There is a story about a millionaire who said: “I can tell you how I earned every million of mine, except the first one”. Indeed if you perceive the life success as a goal for climbing up the endless stairs, it is really difficult to make the first step. I tried to make this book as an exam for the right to climb up the first step.

And finally, it is a groove to write a book like to compose music, draw a picture or sculpture.

Actually the beauty will save the world, software projects and me.

When you see how fragments of thoughts and phrases after patient processing (with painful search of synonyms and making up participles) turn into a coherent text with a logical plot, you derive great incomparable enjoyment.

Programming gives this kind of pleasure as well. It is connected with the moment when disembodied data, requirements, orders, instructions, rumors and fantasies related to the system are like huge heavy stones suddenly become to form in your head a single sculpture. Every particle of a puzzle finds its own place and it remains only to bring them back to life. The stone statue wakes up and hand-made creature begins to take its first steps. This is the greatest pleasure of our profession.