The M.A.D. Experience: Multiperspective Application Development in evolutionary prototyping

Abstract

This paper describes experience obtained through a joint project between a university research group and a shipping company in developing a prototype for a global customer service system. The research group had no previous knowledge of the complex business of shipping, but succeeded in developing a prototype that more than fulfilled the expectations of the shipping company. A major reason for the success of the project is due to an experimental and multiperspective approach to designing for practice. Some of the lessons to be learned for object-orientation are

• analysis is more than finding nouns and verbs,
• design is more than filling in details in the object-oriented analysis model, and
• implementation is more than translating design models into code.

Implications for system development in general and object-orientation in particular consist in the preliminary respecification of the classical working order: analysis - design - implementation.

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