Fred Brooks on the design process
Dan Weinreb’s Weblog is really good, and his style of liveblogging of OOPSLA 2007 is much tidier than mine, and I thought this little bit about Fred Brooks on design process was fascinating:
Fredrick Brooks Jr., author of the classic book “The Mythical Man-Monthâ€, talked about telecollaboration. Most of the talk was about collaboration itself, and under what circumstances it’s a good thing: not always! His main point is that collaboration is great for determining system requirements and brainstorming about possible approaches, but that you really need a single system architect in order to achive conceptual integrity. The system architect can delegate parts of the architecture to others (e.g. the user interface czar), but he distinguishes sharply between delegating design (OK) and sharing design (not OK). He had insightful things to say about the open source process (good for some kinds of software but not others), pair programming (he likes it), and object-oriented programming (the most powerful technique to come along so far to improve software productivity). He is an extremely clear speaker with a lot of good points to make. He’ll be writing a book of essays soon.
The Fred Brooks on the design process by David Crossland, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
November 18, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized
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