Survey 1: Design or Description - Interim Report

Ken Evans — Sat, 24 May 2008 08:58:11 GMT

The "design or description" survey is part of my research for an MSc in Information Systems Management at Liverpool University.
This is a short interim report of my analysis of the responses recieved up to 1 May 2008. The survey had two aims:

1: To repeat part of Graeme Simsion’s research into whether data modeling is a descriptive task or a design task and to compare results.

2: To research the relationship between “design or description” and software development effectiveness.

I was motivated to conduct this research because it seems to me that if you ask someone "just to describe reality" then you are giving them quite a different task than if you ask them to "invent a reality". The critical point for developers is that the two paradigms lead to different tasks and different costs.

If you think that it is important for a developer to know which paradigm to follow, please feel free to post a comment in the "Surveys" section of the forum.

Thanks
Ken

Vintage ORM! Terry Halpin's PhD Thesis - 1989

admin — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:45:51 GMT

Read the original formalization of ORM. Terry Halpin wrote this thesis in 1989 using good old WordStar and a tailor-made driver to print all the symbols on an old dot matrix printer. That is why we only have a bitmap copy of the original.

This file is 18MB

ORM Research

Survey 1: Design or Description - Interim Report

Vintage ORM! Terry Halpin's PhD Thesis - 1989