Two recent invitations have piqued my interest: I’ve been invited to write a paper on the evolution of Structured Analysis, and I’ll be giving a keynote talk on the evolution of modeling techniques at Architecture and Design World in Chicago on July 20th. To appreciate the irony of this, you have to realize that I received my semi-annual royalty report from my publisher a couple weeks ago, indicating that a grand total of two copies of my 1989 opus, Modern Structured Analysis, were sold during the second half of 2005 — and those two sales were offset by three returns of the book from disgruntled readers. On the other hand, there continues to be a modest degree of interest in an updated version of that book, entitled Just Enough Structured Analysis, which is slowly being converted into PDF form; you can see its current state here on my yourdon.com website.

Since I haven’t yet written the paper, or composed the keynote presentation, I won’t bore you with any details at this point — other than to say that modeling in general, and techniques like structured analysis in particular, are still relevant in today’s UML-flavored “agile” world of software development. One of the big things that has changed in the past 15 years, which I’ve had only limited success getting software professionals to think about seriously, is the idea of dynamic models — i.e., models that help provide some insight and perspective into the behavior of a system over a period of time. The field of “system dynamics” has been around for over 30 years, but today’s tools make it much easier to build such models; and my favorite tool (with which I have no commercial relationship) is iThink, from ISEE Systems (formerly High Performance Systems). It comes in both Windows and Mac flavors; if you’re at all interested in the concept of modeling, you should check it out.