Wednesday, February 21, 2007
We had our study group meeting on Sunday. It ran kind of long.
During the first part of this week I felt like I didn`t accomplish
much by being in the meeting this past week. We went over the 431
class notes on OCL. Yes, they are correct but it seems as if they
would not help you answer the questions on the test. Granted I have
not looked at all the slides but it seems as if they are too
rudimentary to answer the PhD exam questions. You will have to go to
the book and learn this stuff. I have taken a break from looking
through the OCL material to concentrate on a fire drill to get my
content ready for next weeks study group meeting. They wanted to have
an intermediate meeting tonight at 7pm. I have gone through a quick
look at the stuff required but it is very quick. I don`t know if they
will have enough background to get into this stuff. The topic is on
Structured Analysis v.s. OO Analysis. In past tests it was very
difficult to get information on the topic of Structured Analysis.
Every book I looked at on the reading list or not had only a few words
on the subject. It was impossible to answer the question fully. I
got a book from the late 70`s to answer the questions. I thought that it
was very historical referring to the classical project
lifecycle....otherwise known as the waterfall model. I found the
information dated and it gave me a really bad taste in my mouth for
the quality of the test. It was not that the test was asking about
historical information but that the quality of the information to
study for the test was not there. If I had ever been exposed to the
topic it would have been easier. So the way I found to get around the
problem of nothing on the net and no books to read was to get a used
book off of Amazon. The book "Structured Analysis and System
Specification" by Tom DeMarco helped. The book was published in
1978 by Yourdon press. Something prompted me to google for the
"Yourdon Report". Say God told me or something. I think that I may
have read it in the DeMarco book or something but it rattled around in
my head for a long time before I went and looked for it. I got
Yourdon`s blog page. The second entry on the page was about the
Structured Design wiki he has and I found an online copy of a book
"Just Enough Structure Analysis by Ed Yourdon". Funny how that
happens. This is an update to Structured Analysis. He talks about
the classical Structured Analysis and its problems. I am worried
about the exam though. The question is written from the classical
sense of the term Structured Analysis. I think I will mention the
information about the "New" Structured Analysis and the "Old"
structured analysis and then kind of give both views of part C of the
question. Part C of the question on the study questions says,
"Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and
suggest an approach that might be suitable for decomposing extremely
large systems." The question implies I think that one has an
advantage over the other. I think Yourdon would say that the "New"
Strucutred analysis would work for very large systems. I think that
Grady Booch would say the "Old" structured analysis could not compare
to OO analysis because of the complexity of today`s systems. I find
this study stuff so baffling. It really depends on the information
that you read and how you read into the question. This is really an
unfair question. It really depends on the graders expertise. If the
grader has a script there may be no way to pass the question unless
you guess what the intended answer is....the classical answer when
taking the test in the 90`s or the today answer when taking the test
in `07. It really depends on your individual history and the history
of the grader. The only thing constant is change.