November 2003 Cutter Benchmark Review -- An Update on Software Modeling: Practices and Patterns

by Robert D. Austin

Let me begin this issue of CBR with a statement of full disclosure: I have not often been a fan of modeling-based approaches to software development, at least not in some of their common manifestations. Software modeling is a practice that often, in my opinion, succumbs to a "forest for the trees" problem. Managers confronting business problems are often justified when they ask, amid mind-numbing discussions about abstract diagrams of yet-to-be-built systems, whether modeling efforts truly move them toward real solutions in an efficient manner. And there is little doubt that some enthusiasts become so absorbed in debates about the theoretical merits of different techniques of, say, process representation -- trees -- that they lose sight of any business forest.