Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
something along these lines was going to be needed. \Do you have someone
in mind?"
Eleanor smiled. \I was thinking of Ira Vernon; he has the modelling expe-
rience and was Release Manager for the Janus Two project | he did a good
job there." \What? The guy with the bootlace ties and that pretentious blue
and silver clip? He's from Texas, isn't he? Seems rather detached."
\I think he is from Arizona, and very proud of his family; I know the bolo
clip is Zuni; I'd like some of their ne turquoise stu myself." Marcus cut in.
\How he dresses is not the issue; would he make a commitment to the job?"
\Yes, I believe he would. I think he can really see the benets and wants to
make it happen." \OK, he'll be reporting to you, so I trust your judgement.
We'll meet with him and then you do an initial job description for the internal
announcement and we'll work on procedures. Do you see any problems with
implementation? You rst, Ivor."
\Well, as always, the problem is in stopping people from taking well-
intended shortcuts, and so duplicating definitions. We need to stress the
importance of having a single source for data items in our code review pro-
cess, and in sta induction." Eleanor nodded. \Yes, training is important, but
so is responsiveness. One of the things Ira will have to do is ensure people
don't see common models as a nice ideal but a practical bottleneck. There
have to be rapid change processes for the information view."
\But we are also facing a culture change in the content of the models. Peo-
ple just aren't used to centralized behaviour constraints; they are always more
prepared to use templates for data structures than for interaction sequences.
We need to work on the tool vendors for better ways of refactoring behaviour;
there may be some useful plug-ins out there that would help."
\OK," Marcus said, glancing out of the window at the gathering clouds,
\you have an intern starting | why don't you set them on to doing a search.
One nal thing; are we sure that taking this direction will improve quality?"
Eleanor paused. \Well, you know Alex did a trawl through our trouble
tickets when he was first getting involved. He reckoned almost 60% of our
faults fixed were attributable to errors in code that duplicated something
already done correctly elsewhere in the system. Mostly the smaller things, of
course, but still a major hassle taken overall."
Marcus nodded. \Fine, let's do it. Eleanor, you'll let me have that draft
job spec by this evening? Then I think we are done." He turned to his screen
to check for messages; the meeting was over.
3.1
The Primacy of Information
The goal of the information viewpoint is to model the shared information
that is manipulated by the system, in order to provide a common understand-
