Speaker

Alan O'Callaghan
De Montfort University

Alan O'Callaghan is a senior researcher in the Software Technologies Research Laboratory in the Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering at De Montfort University in the UK. His main research area is software architecture, and he has authored a pattern language for software architecture called 'Janus'. Besides researching and teaching at his University he is a practicing consultant in Europe and America with a high visibility in the migration of legacy systems to Object and Component-Based architectures.

Alan has edited two books on Object Technology, and has recently collaborated with Ian Graham on the Third Edition of the book, Object-Oriented Methods. He is currently working on a book on software architecture and patterns (based on the Janus pattern language) due out in October, and another project, editing a collection of classic papers on objects with Kevlin Henney. He is a regular contributor to the 101/SIGS journal, Application Development Advisor writing a column on architecture and legacy system migration.

Presentation: "Shrink-Wrapped Thought"

Wednesday 14:15 - 15:00, Protected Room

Much hype and hoo-ha is surrounding the recent publication of the OMG's Model-Driven Architecture. There are some important, welcome advances: not least the concentration on modelling and the stance the MDA emodies that many models (not just a single one) are built during the life-cycle of a project. But the old idea of executable specifications - the holy grail of the formal methods community for decades - has been raised alongside these gains. Some are even beginning to speak in terms of UML as a programming language. In the vendor's frenzy one of the three generic models established in the MDA standards - the Computationally Independent Model (CIM) - has all but disappeared from the discussion. Yet it is this model, and how it gets translated into later models, that it crucial to dealing with the software crisis: and this translation is definitely not automatable. Can design imagination be 'shrink-wrapped' and automated, or is it a fundamentally human-centred activity? This talk adopts the latter viewpoint and states forcibly that tools centred on the MDA are no silver bullet either.

Shrink-Wrapped Thought - (slides)

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