Re: A call to action / Guidelines

[Kevin Cullis <kevincu orci com>]

"Christopher D. Beland" wrote:
> 
> I agree with your comments...I have a few questions, tho:
> 
> > Off-the-top would be during the beginning of the project only and as
> > time would permit, we'd lessen the additions to the feature list to
> > quickly close.  I.e. we'd be working two to three steps ahead of the
> > programmers in designs and documents so that the programmers would
> > have less to worry about and quicker execution.
> 
> What's to keep programmers from (perhaps ignorantly, perhaps out of
> convenience or lameness) building things without looking at these nice
> designs?  This is the biggest problem I've had in my very limited
> experience.  The solution is attainable, but it's one of social
> convention.

Keep communicating!  If most people adopt what we've done, then we'd
encourage them to adopt. If we point of the benefits AND have done some
of their work that they wouldn't have to do, then I would think they
would like that. However, there are some egos out there which would
think their Cut/Copy/Paste icons are the best because THEY like them.  I
personally recoginize that not all of my ideas would fit my wife's ideas
and she the same, but when we come together, that takes some work to do
to get agreement.  No different with programmers.

> 
> > Have you heard of UML? I would think that that would benefit us greatly
> > in documenting our efforts. UML is VERY process driven and it would help
> > if we all used it.  DIA for Linux has a UML function.  We should look at
> > it.
> >
> > This is where I excel, documenting the process and I've already begun
> > this with the LDP folks.  Both documents should be aligned so that it's
> > easy to move from one to the other and traceability is VERY important
> > from a QA perspective. I'll at least start something in the next few
> > days, like an outline.
> 
> I'm not familiar with any of these TLAs; could you explain?  8)
> 

UML is Unified Modeling Language by Rationale Rose CTOs (I think) and
the authors Booch, Jacobson, and Rumbaugh.  UML is the "successor to the
wave of object-orientated analysis and design (OOA&D) methods that
appeared in the late '80s and early '90s."  That's from page 1 of the
book, "UML Distilled, 2nd Edition, A Brief Guid to the Standard Object
Modeling Language."  Most big organzations use UML to help chart their
actions for planning and execution of the plan. I find DIA (check out
freshmeat.net) to be a great free progrmm to use which can document UML
stuff.

How about if I read what's be done before before I write that outline?

Kevin

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