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Department of Computer Science

EM and software development

Some ideas to reflect on ...

External sources ...

Michael Jackson on

  • the distinction between routine and radical design in complex software system development
  • the dangers of premature commitment in decomposition of an application, as revealed by the consideration of "problem frames"

(This is discussed to some extent in EM paper #114.)

Bonnie Nardi on spreadsheets in support of end-user development in A Small Matter of Programming...

Naur on the importance of intuition in software development (cf. EM paper #105)

Bernd Mahr and the nature of modelling for software development (cf. EM paper #114)

Programming on the web as moving from the static to the dynamic webpage cf. JavaScript

Mash-ups, end-user programming, Google spreadsheets, visual programming, event-driven programming, Scratch ...

Bret Victor ... programming as construction in the sense of Papert

Maxim Mozgovoy reflecting on EM and programming ...

Kent Beck on XP and a driving analogy ...

EM contributors ...

Steve Russ's reflection slides (Session 2.3) ... personal/functional - sequential/concurrent - automated/human-driven

Nick Pope's perspective on software development as exemplified in the Stargate model

Simon Yung on how EM contributed to his programming practice ...

Chris Brown on test-driven development ...

Richard Cartwright: on the value of studying Empirical Modelling (paraphrased by WMB):

... whenever someone comes along and says - "I've got the most amazing agile object-oriented method that subsumes functional programming and constraint-based programming etc etc" - I can say to myself with confidence "No you haven't ..."

The guest lectures given on CS405 by Antony Harfield (Lecture 5: 2009-10), Charlie Care (Lecture 17: 2010-11) and Karl King (Lecture 18: 2011-12)

In responding to these reflections, the most important thing to bear in mind is the quality of the experience that EM construals offer and the extent to which this quality is acknowledged and/or realised in the alternative approaches being proposed /discussed. Relevant EM references include: