Raul Sidnei Wazlawick
At this point the reader must have been asking why a picture of a loom is on the front cover of this book. Even if you are not asking that, I’ll tell you anyway. The reason is twofold: symbolic and historical.
The symbolic reason is that there are similarities between the process of producing software and producing fabrics with a loom. First you plan, and you draft the result you intend to produce; and then you execute your work and see if it is going well. The many colors of string used to produce a fabric may be compared to the many aspects of information and technology that must be weaved to produce the patterns that are desired in the product. Work done on a loom can be undone as work done on software can. After that, it can be refactored.
Producing nice patterns in fabrics may appear complex and confusing for unskilled people; the same is true for producing software. But if the best practices, techniques, and tools are used, the process is smoothed.
A difference between these processes is that working on looms has been automated since the eighteenth century, while the software industry is just taking the first steps towards automation. Furthermore, software development is so complex that many people doubt that it could be successfully automated someday. However, although the complexity of software is growing each year, new techniques to improve our capacity to cope with that complexity are being learned and used.
The historical reason that links looms to this book is based on the six degrees of separation:
1. One of the first automatic complex machines were looms controlled by punched cards that were invented in France around 1725 and greatly improved by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. They became a big commercial success and almost cost Jacquard his life because of the fierce opposition of silk weavers that were afraid of losing their jobs.
2. Punched cards were used by Herman Hollerith as a data entry mechanism for his Electric Tabulating Machine, which was used in the American census of 1890, reducing drastically the time to obtain results.
3. Hollerith’s company, the Tabulating Machine Company, fused with other companies in 1911 to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR), which in 1924 changed its name to the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
4. In 2003, IBM acquired, for 2.3 billion dollars, the Rational Company, which was responsible, among other products, for the Unified Process and the Unified Modeling Language (UML).
5. The present book addresses many aspects of the Unified Process, and uses UML and its byproducts OCL and IFML for modeling.
As far as I can see, five degrees of separation were sufficient.
September 12th, 2013.