Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

Last night I had the priviledge to listen to Phil Armour speak for over two hours. His Of Zeppelins and Jet Planes presentation was excellent. What is it about us Americans that so enjoys English accents?

Phil's thinking is based on the premise that software is the fifth knowledge storage media since the beginning of the world (the first four were DNA, brains, devices, and books). Rather than approaching software as a product, we must see it as a media that stores knowledge. The power of software lies in its similarity with devices: it is executable. Yet it has a key advantage over devices: it is easily adaptable. I feel the idea of software as executable knowledge is right on target and fits into the thinking behind agile software development.

The nugget of insight I most enjoyed came when Phil turned his premise (that software development is a knowledge acquisition activity) upside down: that software development is an ignorance reduction activity. This excited me because it fits perfectly into my experiences as a family therapist. I was trained to maintain an attitude of "not knowing" when working with families. I have found this attitude very helpful in software development because it implies that there is always something to learn. And when I'm learning, I feel alive.

Posted by Dave [Link]

Working on the still infant ReflectingTeam project has been an excellent experience. I'm having a ball working with Struts and Prevayler, developing Test-First (via JUnit and StrutsTestCase). Roman is my pair/consultant a couple times a week which has been helpful.

Tonight is the first ChAD meeting in a while. I'm looking forward to hearing what Phil Armour has to say.

Posted by Dave [Link]

After ranting about object relational mapping last Friday, I started playing around with Prevayler. I'm developing a collective journaling application for software development projects. I'm pairing with Roman on it a couple times a week.

It's been great to get neck deep in TDD again, I'm learning a lot. And I must say, Prevayler has been excellent thus far.

Posted by Dave [Link]

After finishing A Pattern Language, I read Alistair Cockburn's incredible PhD dissertation. It provided me with a much better framework for my research, and opened my eyes to some of his earlier papers that I am finding very interesting. It also introduced me to Lars Mathiassen's Reflective Systems Development, which I have started reading. I have high hopes that Mathiassen's work will play well with Weick and Roberts collective mind theory.

At the same time, I'm reading Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Architecture, which is excellent, though the more I read it, the more I like the idea of object-oriented databases. When I think of the amount of resources spent on mapping objects to relational databases, it's mind boggling. I am definitely idealistic and naive, but I don't understand why OO databases aren't more mainstream. It just seems like such an unbelievable waste to spend so much time and money on O/R mapping when it provides so little real business value.

Posted by Dave [Link]

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