Christian Thilmany

Developers at some point in their careers will find themselves standing at the whiteboard, trying their best to regurgitate some complex development design they've spent all night working on. This is usually done with a series of strange symbols, arrows and scribblings in an attempt to convey the clarity that may lie in the head of said developer (unless of course he or she doesn't know what exactly the design is supposed to look like). Either way, you have the same problem. In an object-oriented fashion, how do you make tangible a design that's intangible yet very repeatable? How do you communicate ­ or in the latter case, how do you come up with ­ something you know in your heart you've done before but maybe in a slightly different way. And I'm not talking about UML. UML helps, but it provides only the hieroglyphics you may need to communicate your design. What y... (more)