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Software Modelling: Soft Focus or Hard Edges?

An ex-colleague recently posted a question about “model-driven architecture” (or MDA for short) at the company he works for. It was a set of issues that I’ve heard many times in different guises over the years, phrased in different ways. I’d paraphrase what he said something like this (the original was more coherent):

Some people here seem to think it’s better to have a process where you have to design everything in UML up front, so that you’re forced to model things before you can write a line of code. In fact, they want to universally generate a code “backbone” from the model, which means the UML has to be constrained and decorated with extra detail so that code generation can succeed. This runs counter to my experience that super detailed design throughout the project lifecycle doesn’t really help. Testing should drive development, not ever-more-detailed design. Agile development really seems better than model-driven architecture.

This made me think about a bunch of reactions that I’ve had — also recurring over the years — to this kind of question. After all, model-driven approaches and agile development are hardly new concepts, although the nomenclature of “MDA” and “agile” is more recent.

I replied something like this…

[Continued…]

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New Mexico, Episode 1: The Church Of Cartesian Space

My wife and I just returned from a glorious 2-week, 2000+ mile road trip in many parts of New Mexico. Now, it’s been my practice to write a post after such trips, with a travelogue of some nature accompanied by a cornucopia of pictures. This trip, however, produced such a wealth of experiences and memories that I feel overwhelmed by the prospect of sitting down and summarizing it. The intensity, the quantity and the diversity of what can be seen in New Mexico are daunting.

At some point I realized the way to go was episodic: whenever I feel up to it, to simply pick some fragment of the trip, any fragment, and work with those images and those memories.

Part The First: The Church Of Cartesian Space, describing our visit to Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in Pie Town, New Mexico.

[Continued…]

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