[Home Page] - [Reviews Main]

Business Engineering With Object Technology by David Taylor Recommended

ISBN: 0-471-04521-7       Publisher: Wiley       Pages: 188pp       Price: £13-95

Categories:   business     object oriented     management     modelling languages

Reviewed by Peter Tillier in C Vu 8-6 (Sep 1996)

David Taylor suggests an approach, based on Software Systems Engineering ( SSE ) principles, known as Convergent Engineering. He argues that SSE fails in the main because the 'Business Perspective' and the 'Software Perspective' need to be reconciled for a successful outcome. Such reconciliation is rarely achieved because it is difficult to identify the relationships between the two viewpoints for companies with a substantial number of business processes.

In 'traditional' systems development one program may implement one part, or a number of parts, of a number of business processes and vice-versa. This means that when the business process changes to support its environment change it will be difficult to identify how much of the software needs to change to follow suit. For any enterprises that need an IT department this will be a serious management and configuration control problem.

David Taylor argues that to solve these problems we need to implement the business process design directly in the software; so that the relationships are clearly identified. The means that he chooses is Convergent Engineering, which is based upon Object-Oriented ideas.

This approach uses well-known modelling techniques to carry out and manage the modelling process. Interestingly, David Taylor appears not to be in favour of Rapid 'Prototyping' for all but very small development teams (this fits in with my experience) and points out the consequences of using it in large-scale developments--'Rabid Prototyping'.

The book gives sound advice about the practical aspects of managing developments and so would, I think, be useful to anyone managing a team of developers--even non-OO. Many of the comments in this book echo those in Bertrand Meyer's book 'Object Success' which also looks at the development process from a practitioner's viewpoint.

This book is certainly worth reading but will not suit the 'let's cut some code and test it until it's right' brigade.

Comment: I hope that code and test practitioners are a dying breed but... - Francis Glassborow.