Chapter 11. Putting It All Together: Reflecting on the Work of Design

Chapter 11. Putting It All Together: Reflecting on the Work of Design

when you build a thing, you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole, and the thing that you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Christopher Alexander (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein 1977, xiii)

Normally, long before the end, a book on the UML describes a development process to be used by the reader as a mental framework for embedding the work products of modeling. Because the UML is independent of process, a framework has to be provided, and that framework is invariably interpreted as the work of development.

A predefined process is tempting as a framework; as a canned solution, it obviates elaborate discussions of the context and forces within that context that constitute the real reasons for using the UML. And a process provides an easy means of embedding the UML in the work-to-be-done, via stereotypical examples that function as Kuhn's exemplars for the budding UML user.

In this book, I've taken a different approach, showing how modeling itself, as a skill and an activity, provides a context for using the UML. I've also relied on patterns to provide a starting point for looking at how modeling should be done, both generally and idiomatically.

However, there's an additional purpose that a process provides for a software book, which is still missing here: A process ties everything together the theory, the artifacts, the techniques and weaves a whole out of the parts, even if the process is only an indirect contributor to the book's contents. In this chapter, I will provide this missing ingredient. I'll take a different approach by pulling together rather than tying together the various elements of the book. And, rather than the work of development, I'll focus on the work of design. In particular, I'll be using the ideas on the practice of design that Donald Schon of M.I.T first published twenty years ago ideas that are just now getting serious attention in the systems development world. With Schon's help, I'll attempt to show a different way of seeing how the UML and patterns fit into the work-to-be-done of design.



A UML Pattern Language
A UML Pattern Language (Software Engineering)
ISBN: 157870118X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 100
Authors: Paul Evitts

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