Acknowledgments


First and foremost, we must acknowledge our debt to the late Sally Shlaer. She started this ball rolling in the mid-1970s with a project that generated FORTRAN from a set of primitive data and program files, with daily builds and perhaps astonishingly many of the trappings of today's agile processes. The system, a radiation treatment facility, had only five bugs in its first full system test. None lasted over forty-eight hours. And a good job too, given the subject matter. We deeply miss her warmth, her unparalleled concern for people, and especially her steel-trap mind.

In our work together in the late eighties, we focused on objects as an organizing principle for describing data and behavior, culminating in the two Shlaer-Mellor books. Execution was then, and is now, the goal. Since then, of course, the UML has become the lingua franca of object modeling, but the UML, until the recent past, has not been executable. This book is intended to link together the executable ideas of Shlaer-Mellor with the universality of UML.

Someone, someday, should write a paper about the four stages of review and how they correspond to the four stage of grief. First there's disbelief, then denial, then bargaining, and finally acceptance. The paper should discuss the correspondence between "denial" and the abuse heaped upon the reviewers as it becomes all too clear that the work needs to be revised. Fortunately, we didn't send too many of the hate mails we composed.

The table below lists our unfortunate reviewers. Those reviewers marked with a * were a part of the formal review team. We thank them all for their sterling efforts and apologize profusely to their burning ears.

* Conrad Bock Mark Blackburn Alistair Blair
* Dirk Epperson Scott Finnie * Martin Fowler
* Takao Futagami Kazuto Horimatsu Yukitoshi Okamura
* Edwin Seidewitz * Leon Starr * William G. Tanner

We would especially like to thank Conrad Bock, Director of Standards at Kabira Technologies, one of the few people worldwide who has the whole UML in his head, who provided a most detailed and so, if he'll forgive us, an especially annoying review.

We would like to thank the many talented analysts and developers at ThoughtWorks (http://www.thoughtworks.com), including Chief Scientist Martin Fowler, for keeping our focus on executability and its impact on agile development.

Our thanks, too, to William G. Tanner, Software Development Manager at Project Technology, Inc., who is apparently able to review executable models with a model compiler in his head.

This book would not be possible without the professionalism of the staff at Addison Wesley. Susan Winer, our copy editor, moved better than 50% of our commas and performed countless acts of linguistic hygiene. Kate Saliba, who leads the marketing team, has kept the project on track as it moved into production. John Fuller has been tolerant as we have attempted to do his job as production editor. Finally, our thanks to Paul "Eyebrows" Becker, alternately patient and a pain, who has cajoled us into finishing this project. Authors are not (always) easy to get along with!

Finally, we'd like to thank members of the community who have long understood the benefits of execution and modeling at a high level of abstraction. You know who you are, and we wouldn't still be here if it weren't for you. Thanks.



Executable UML. A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture
Executable UML: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture
ISBN: 0201748045
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 161

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