On the Role of Methodology: Advice to the Advisors

The field of software development methodology is not new. Its origins may be traced to Dijkstra's famous "Goto" letter [1] and subsequent publications by the same author and his colleagues on structured programming. More recent literature, however, has not always been up to the intellectual standards of that early work. The present discussion was prompted by a critical examination of the currently available methodological work in the object-oriented area. This leads to a number of precepts that all methodologists should follow. Even a casual look at the objectoriented literature yields many counter-examples: rules that are unusable, poorly thought out, or simply wrong. This article focuses on the precepts rather than the counter-examples, if only to avoid the unpleasantness of having to take well-known methodologists to task.