ooPSLA 2007
Posted by Skrud at Friday, October 26th 2007 at 6:37pm
Attending ooPSLA was a phenomenal experience. My brain has been working overtime, at 150% efficiency, to try and understand and make sense of everything I’ve seen and heard and read this past week. I felt like I understood quite a bit, but I was challenged by even more. For each nugget of golden information I managed to get out of a particular lecture, I’m sure there were many more that flew a few thousand metres over my head. Whatever I write about here is ooPSLA as I was able to understand it, and I probably got a few things wrong.
I was scribbling notes during each lecture I attended, and going over them I can see one theme that permeated the entire conference more than any other: communication, starting with DesignFest, which was the first event I went to.
Software engineers face an infinite number of challenges involving communication. We’re not only talking about communication between software designers and customers, but also between software engineers and each other. How do you get people to communicate clearly and precisely? How can you distribute the intellectual work of software design and still maintain Conceptual Integrity? You need to be able to not only work together with someone face-to-face, but more and more you need to be able to work with people in other places, so called “telecollaboration” (more on this topic when I write about Fred Brooks’ keynote).
Think about the overhead and the time it takes in order to make another person understand the design you have going on in your head? UML models can only express so much, but they have their limits (as does any language). That’s why there were even tutorials, such as the one I attended – “The Art of Telling Your Design Story”, by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock – which are all about how to communicate your design to someone else.
As a whole, ooPSLA was a legendary experience that I never want to forget. This is one more aspect of my life that I have to thank Dominique for. She told me about the ooPSLA Student Volunteer program, and if it weren’t that I probably never would’ve even found out that the conference was in Montreal! Thanks, Dom! :D
Yay for props! I guess I should update my website now that it’s being linked to. ;)