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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
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Title:
The Object-Oriented Development Process
Author:
Tom Rowlett
ISBN:
0 13 030621 5
Publisher:
Prentice Hall
Pages:
421
Price:
£43-99
Reviewer:
James Roberts
Subject:
management; object oriented
Appeared in:
16-4
This book is a guide to using a particular development process for an object-oriented environment. The author seems to have developed it himself, and named it (modestly) 'The Object-Oriented Development Process'. The process itself is very much the usual kind of thing (use case, state diagrams, class diagrams etc), explained unusually clearly and logically. It also includes non-Object-Oriented techniques (truth tables for example), which, as the author points out, are just as applicable to Object Oriented projects.

The book's strengths are the clarity of the writing, and the way that the author manages to maintain a logical thread of the process from initial requirements through to testing and maintenance (the very mention of which is rather a novelty). I particularly enjoyed the early sections of the book, where the suggested process for generating the analysis model is documented

I am not sure whether I would like to take the process defined in this book 'lock, stock and barrel' onto a project. However, I would not hesitate to use this book to help explain to colleagues what we are trying to achieve with existing processes.

One feature of this book is a detailed example of a development project ('video store' implementation) to which the author repeatedly returns to for illustration. This would probably be an irritation for someone skimming the book. However, it does illustrate how the process holds together, and so is probably worth the space taken up as an aid to more detailed study.

My only complaint about the book is the title - a reader might be confused into buying this book thinking that it was a review of OO development processes, which this book is not.

Recommended.