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Speaker:
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is lead author of the new book,
Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities and Collaborations (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
and a recognized innovator in object analysis and design techniques.
As president of Wirfs-Brock Associates, she specializes in the transfer of
object analysis and design expertise to organizations and individuals through
training, mentoring, and consulting.
She is an adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute where she teaches
object analysis and design.
Rebecca invented the set of development practices known as
Responsibility-Driven Design and use case conversations.
She spent 17 years as a Software Engineer at Tektronix,
where among other accomplishments, she managed the first commercial Smalltalk
effort and was the technical lead for the development of Color Smalltalk.
She has written articles, lectured and presented tutorials on object analysis,
design and management topics, and has been an innovator in object technology since 1984.
Recently, she designed a telecommunications framework,
and mentored teams designs in use case writing, analysis, design,
architecture and managing incremental, and iterative object-technology projects.
Lecture:
Agile designers see the essence of a design problem, shape reasonable solutions, and easily communicate their design choices to others. And when things don’t exactly go according to plan, they react, readjust their thinking, and try again. In order to pull this off, agile designers need to be skillful problem solvers and good communicators (and no, that doesn’t mean just writing clean code or producing barely enough UML).
This lecture introduces several new and perhaps some old and familiar techniques for seeing and articulating design problems, shaping solutions, and explaining designs. We’ll touch on strategies for finding and forming good abstractions, designing application control centers, designing reliable collaborations, and supporting design variations.
Recognizing and adapting to different design rhythms is another key to design agility. By sorting design problems into the core, the revealing, and the rest, you can treat each appropriately, rather than giving them uniform treatment. But even so, problems crop up that cannot be anticipated—wicked problems that can’t be solved by sheer effort alone. They require a blend of skills: creative problem solving, negotiation, the ability to craft-try-rethink-and-propose solutions that combine simpler ideas or possibly take a leap in a totally new direction. When wicked design problems are discovered agile designers (and their management) need to recognize that adequate solutions develop over time.
Schedule:
Hors d'oeuvres will be served from 5:30
until 7:00 p.m. Rebecca will lecture until 8:00, at which time dessert will be served.
Following dessert, she will continue her lecture and take questions, concluding her presentation by 10:00 p.m.
The series:
This is the second in a series of Distinguished Lecture Events about agility and its perceived nemeses at the O'Shaughnessy Education Center (OEC) on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.
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