Object-Oriented Analysis & Design Lars Mathiassen, Andreas Munk-Madsen, Peter Axel Nielsen and Jan Stage. ISBN: 87-7751-150-6 Edition: 1st edition Published: 2000 Pages: 456

Michael Jackson writes

Scandinavia has a long and notable tradition in computer science and software engineering. Peter Naur was a major contributor to the development of Algol-60 and co-inventor of the Backus-Naur notation in which its syntax and that of many subsequent languages was described. The original ideas of object oriented programming came out of the work of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard on Simula 67. Per Brinch Hansen did fundamental work in concurrency and operating systems and in languages for parallel programming. Bjarne Stroustrup brought object orientation to the huge community of C programmers in the C++ language.

Now Lars Mathiassen, Andreas Munk-Madsen, Peter Axel Nielsen, and Jan Stage have written this excellent book on object-oriented analysis and design. It is written in a refreshingly mild style, open-minded and gentle and easy to read. The case studies are varied: two well-known example problems, automobile cruise control and IFIPS conference management, and two less familiar, the management of a hairdressing salon and a monitoring system for a rescue station that operates fire engines, ambulances and breakdown trucks. Little illustrations of particular points abound in the text.

Their approach to development method is sensibly eclectic. They draw on ideas from Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology and from Structured Analysis and Design; they take use cases from Jacobson, and the model-function separation from JSD; they bring in design evaluation criteria from Tom Gilb and Bertrand Meyer.

In the best Scandinavian tradition they are civilized, undogmatic and humane. They emphasize the importance of user involvement, and put interface design in its proper place in their approach. They don't allow themselves to be drawn into an excessively technical treatment of each problem, forgetting its real-world context in the excitement of playing with the UML notations that, after all, are designed to represent programs. And, citing Peter Naur's delightful book Computing: A Human Activity, they remember to remind us that the most useful and important documentation is often what is written in natural language. I am sure you will enjoy reading this book.

April 2000

Michael Jackson