Die DNUG Braunschweig trifft sich am 20.03.2013 um 19:00 im Restaurant Zucker (Tagungsraum). Dieses Mal kommt Chris Chedgey mit einem Vortrag über “Rediscovering Modularity”.
Abstract
The principles of modularity have been applied to engineering projects since Gorak built the wheel, and Thag the barrow of the world’s first wheelbarrow. Thag’s barrow didn’t care that the wheel was first hewn from rock, and later upgraded to a lighter, wooden one, and Gorak’s wheel design was reused for the world’s first chariot. This is how humans make sense of complexity – we divide and conquer.
Analogous principles of modularity are taught in Software Engineering 101 – information hiding, interfaces, clear responsibility, high internal cohesion, low external coupling, etc., and we apply these routinely as we develop, and continuously refactor the code encapsulated within classes.
However when the number of classes reaches some threshold, higher level abstractions are needed in order to manage the complexity of the growing codebase. This limit is usually overshot and the team is soon drowning in an ocean of classes. At this point it is time to restructure the code-base into a hierarchy of modules above the class level, or watch the team’s frustration continue to rise, and productivity plummet.
This talk proposes a measurement framework for assessing the quality of a modular structure, identifying regions of poor modularity, and for assessing the impact of restructuring or refactoring actions. Based on this framework, the talk introduces strategies for retro-fitting modularity to an existing codebase, with minimum impact on the code logic itself.
This material is based on experience gained while helping many development teams through the restructuring process. The concepts will be illustrated by examples.
About Chris Chedgey
Chris holds an MSc. from Trinity College Dublin, and has 28 years’ experience in Software Engineering, on both the process and product sides of development. After graduation he worked as a researcher in tools to support the application of formal methods to the development of software. He joined the $1bn Canadian Space Station Project in 1990 where he was a member of the team that defined the software development processes and tools for the program, and then technical lead on the Remote Manipulator System control software. In 1994 he joined the $1.5bn Iris program which replaced the entire communications systems for the Canadian armed forces, first on the process/toolsmithing side, and then the product development side. In 2000 he returned to Ireland and founded Headway Software to address the lack of large-scale modularity that he saw as pervasive in software industry. For 12 years Chris has designed tools such as Restructure101 for retrofitting a modular structure to large tangled code-bases, and Structure101 for the definition, communication, and enforcement of architecture. These tools are characterized by major advances in visualization technology, Chris’s passion. Today he helps organizations that need to restructure their code-bases, and is a lively speaker on the need for modularity, and the strategies to refactor in the large. He lives on the south coast of Ireland, where he likes to sail when it’s windy, and walk the dog when it’s not.
Wie immer ist die Veranstaltung kostenlos! Weitere Informationen zur DNUG Braunschweig können hier gefunden werden: http://www.dotnet-braunschweig.de
