Finding the object (workshop session)

Abstract

The purpose of this workshop was to discuss finding the object-that is, how software engineers imagine, invent, design, or recycle objects and their behaviors for object-oriented software engineering. The workshop organizers (and, as we subsequently discovered, several of the workshop participants) felt that this issue is crucial to successful objectoriented software engineering (after all, finding objects is what the process is all about, isn’t it?). Unfortunately, when previous workshops have had the opportunity to review and discuss techniques practitioners use to find objects, too often the results were heated debates on “what is an object?’ which becomes all consuming. We believed that, given appropriate control over the question of which kind of “object” is being discussed (which meant tell us what object you are trying to find, then tell us your method), a workshop to concentrate on techniques for finding objects would be quite appropriate to the ECOOP/OOPSLA forum.cWaldo>