Objects Arise

In the 1980s and 1990s, objects came to the fore. If you look at the way objects were originally derived, by identifying proper nouns, common nouns, and verbs, you can see that they are directly linked to the simplest parts of natural language. Objects and classes embody abstraction and information hiding at the most direct level. It is easy to think of them as commonplace things, far from the difficulty of most of software engineering.

Grady Booch in his second book on Ada described how to derive objects from natural language, using common nouns as objects or classes of objects, proper nouns as instances of objects, and verbs as interfaces [Booch94]. Later, he wrote a series of books on object-orientation [Booch86].

The company he worked for, Rational, began as a maker of machines using Ada as native code, thus making the boxcar of a language very fast. His two Ada books fit the company s desire to have companion explanations of doing software. Booch moved into objects as Rational decided to reposition itself from a hardware company to a software tool company. They also acquired as employees Ivar Jacobsen and James Rumbaugh. Rumbaugh was the Object Modeling Technique (OMT) originator.

These two, with Booch, became known as the Three Amigos in the community. They developed a method for objects that use all the previously described activities and concepts. This method is the Unified Process (UP), and it uses the tools of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Since Rational s UML tool suite, Rose, has become so identified with the Three Amigos, and has sold so well, UP is better known as RUP (Rational Unified Process). Thus, UP takes what engineers have learned about growing software through iterative life cycles and couples it with abstraction and information hiding [Jacobsen99]. There is more about the UP and UML in Chapter 2.

UP is large, UML itself is quite large, and documentation is a big part of the method. The way we look at it, documentation that eases the repair or transition processes is all right, but sometimes UP documents put people off. Excessive documentation is partially solved by the agile methods , as is described in what follows .