[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A Plea for Schemas
Paul Prescod <paul@p...> writes: > You can also use UML, set theory or Zen meditation to flush out > misunderstanding but schema writing has the big advantage of > providing immediate, interactive utility. Some customers say: "You > mean we have to go to all of this work to understand our problem > domain before we implement the code? Who has time for that?" The > more saavy ones say: "finally we have an excuse to map our our > problem domain without feeling like we are wasting time drawing > pretty pictures." Obviously, what works best will depend on the problem and on the people and personalities involved. In my experience, formal specifications (schemas, UML diagrams, etc.) tend to be a serious distraction early in a large project, because they allow people to caught up in details far too soon. Later on during a project's development, object models, data models, DTDs, and their like can also give the false impression of actually having accomplished something ("see, here's our object model on this wall -- just follow it around out into the hall and down past the the lunchroom") and thus postpone the realization that a project is in serious danger of being delayed or of failing completely. It's always easier to keep spewing out more UML or DTDs than it is actually to start building a working system. Formal models do (as Paul says) help to flush out misunderstandings, but they tend to find misunderstandings over fairly fine details, which are appropriate to the later stages of a project. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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