I wasn’t there, but apparently Grady Booch made a comment at OOPSLA last month that throwing away models is a good thing. Juha-Pekka’saccount of the Design and Modern Software Practices Panel has Grady saying “when the project gets closer to the delivery you normally throw away UML models. This is a natural choice since the efforts needed for keeping the design – user view, dynamics, behavior, interaction etc. – linked with the implementation are simply too high.” Ivan Moorehas Grady saying “I often throw models away but tend not to throw away the source code.”
I’ve gotta believe that this comment was somehow taken out of context and that the Grand Poobah of the Common Semantic Model doesn’t actually believe that tossing the model at the end o the project is a good thing. If we view these comments thru the lens of Code is Model, you realize this is a major violation of the “Models must be Intrinsic to the Development Process” tenet. Since code is model, it seems silly to throw out the UML model and keep the code model. The only reason I could think to do that, is because the UML model has no value.
And this leaves me wondering, exactly how much benefit does Grady Booch get from his UML model if he’s willing to throw them away near the end of the project.