25th Oct. Shanghai China, I heard Ivar Jacobson's speech about his understanding about the next generation of software process. IMHO, his key point is to make UP(Unified process) more agile than agile process, which he called "smart". Then I wasn't much convined, because I thought his understanding dpend too much on a intellegent product called "WayPointer" developed by one of his own company. But later when I went home and used WayPointer trial edition accompanied with the provided CD to work with Rational's product, I understand everything. It really can make RUP more agile. It's a intellegent agent acts as pair programmer, telling you when and what parts of RUP document to read.
And, another of his point supporting the key point is UP use explicit knowledge rather than tacit knowledge, which make ailge seem to be agile, used by agile process. With explicit knowledge you can learn and you can search for what to do next in the knowledge library. However, tacit knowlege is never documented and hard to be learned and harder to be searched. So the most experienced programmer have the most tacit knowledge, which make success of project primarily rely on key individuals. So, is Agile process really agile?（Anyone wants a PPT of his speech, email me at i.am.blogger at gmail dot com).
What a pity, Dr. Ivar didn't talk much about doing use case with aop, which he proposed in his latest papers and later turned out a book about AOSD(I got the book for free at the speech : ). So the following part of my blog will cover this aspect.
The report was received with complacency:" This is the nature of software--use case cross component--and there's nothing to be done about it."In RUP, use case play a very important role, elicitating requirements, coordinating stakeholder requests, measuring the grain of iteration. According to RUP, use cases are finded out, refined and then usually implemented in several components, that is, simply speaking, a use case is often devided into parts assigning to components(Classes, to simplify the matter) according to each component's reponsibility. However, that's not the end. In RUP test cases are derived from use cases, which means testing is usually conducted in terms of use case to verify every use case is correctly implemented. All we see is that it's really a use case driven way, but traditional components stands in the way, breaking down use cases. It seems if we are royal enough to use case technology, traditional component-centric development contribute negatively to the whole development process.And interestingly enough, in an AOP view, it's typically crosscutting, with every use case almost always cross cutting components. Dr. Ivar has his own way of solving this problem, which he proposed in
this paper.
But I wonder if a use case driven method is widely adopted, otherwise it isn't worth much effort on this issue.So here I wanna conduct a survey, how many companies use USE CASE technology and to what degree use case technology is adopted (only used to handle requirement issue or as a use case driven development way)?Any comment about either my ideas or this survey would be very appreciated.
