Bulldozer00's Blog

I’ve always questioned why one of my mentors from afar, Steve Mellor, was one of the original signatories of the “Agile Manifesto” 10 years ago. He’s always been a “model-based” guy and his fellow pioneer agile dudes were obsessed with the idea that source code was the only truth – to hell with bogus models and camouflage documents. Even Grady Booch, another guy I admire, tempered the agilist obsession with code by stating something like this: “the code is the truth, but not the whole truth“.

Stephen recently sated my 10 year old curiosity in this InfoQ interview: “A Personal Reflection on Agile Ten Years On“. Here’s Steve’s answer to the question that haunted me fer 10 ears:

The other signatories were kind enough, back in 2001, to write the manifesto using the word “software” (which can include executable models), not “code” (which is more specific.) As such I felt able, in good conscience, to become a signatory to the Manifesto while continuing to promote executable modeling. Ten years on we have a standard action language for agile modeling. – Stephen J. Mellor

The reason I have great respect for Stephen (and his cohort Paul Ward) is this brilliant trilogy they wrote waaaayy back in the mid 80s:

Despite the dorky book covers and the dates they were written, I think the info in these short tomes is timeless and still relevant to real-time systems builders today. Of course, they were created before the object-oriented and multi-core revolutions occurred, but these books, using simple DeMarco/Plauger structured analysis modeling notation (before UML), nail it. By “it”, I mean the thinking, tools, techniques, idioms, and heuristics required to specify, design, and build concurrent, distributed, real-time systems that work. Buy em, read em, decide for yourself, bookmark this post, and please report your thoughts back to me.