September 22nd, 2006
Chapter 1 of my Just Enough Structured Analysis book has now been uploaded to the wiki, which you can find here.
I’ll probably continue moving forward through the remaining chapters, at an average rate of a chapter a day. It will probably take another few weeks to upload all of the material from the HTML-based manuscript, which is still on my website here.
In the meantime, you are welcome to start correcting, updating, revising, and improving the material that’s already on the wiki. I’ve been busy with about a dozen other projects recently, and have not yet had the chance to start making my own edits — but I plan to do so as soon as I get a spare moment.
Of course, the wiki environment (we’re using MediaWiki for this initiative) provides the facility for adding comments and discussion; but if you’d prefer to make such comments outside the wiki environment, you’re welcome to add comments to this blog posting, or send email directly to me at “ed (at) yourdon (dot) com”.
September 28th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
Ed -
Great idea to republish the book via Wiki.
Sorry to ignore the other 98% of the book, but I’m going to pick on Chapter 10—the Data Dictionary. My hobby horse. Apologies in advance.
Great idea (the data dictionary). Totally necessary.
But WHY—after 30+ years—are there effectively no such tools?
Yes, there are (a few, VERY few) extremely expensive “enterprise metadata repository” claimants, but after 30+ years as a tool genre, success stories are as rare as hen’s teeth.
Recently I’ve taken to lowering my sights & asking if when people come to a project they’re given a “glossary” of terms in use for this project. By far the typical answer is either “Are you kidding?” or “Huh?”
So we’re on a treadmill… in our rush to work on systems we don’t have time to thoroughly scour the (unknown) universe to see what already exists, so we simply make another one & another one & another one, ad infinitum.
Seems tremendously wasteful to me.
- David