This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
1.8 History
The history of OOA/D has many branches, and this brief synopsis can't do justice to all the contributors. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of OO programming languages, such as Simula and Smalltalk, with key contributors such as Kristen Nygaard and especially Alan Kay, the visionary computer scientist who founded Smalltalk. Kay coined the terms object-oriented programming and personal computing, and helped pull together the ideas of the modern PC while at Xerox PARC. [2]
But OOA/D was informal through that period, and it wasn't until 1982 that OOD emerged as a topic in its own right. This milestone came when Grady Booch (also a UML founder) wrote the first paper titled Object-Oriented Design, probably coining the term [Booch82]. Many other well-known OOA/D pioneers developed their ideas during the 1980s: Kent Beck, Peter Coad, Don Firesmith, Ivar Jacobson (a UML founder), Steve Mellor, Bertrand Meyer, Jim Rumbaugh (a UML founder), and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, among others. Meyer published one of the early influential books, Object-Oriented Software Construction, in 1988. And Mellor and Schlaer published Object-Oriented Systems Analysis, coining the term object-oriented analysis, in the same year. Peter Coad created a complete OOA/D method in the late 1980s and published, in 1990 and 1991, the twin volumes Object-Oriented Analysis and Object-Oriented Design. Also in 1990, Wirfs-Brock and others described the responsibility-driven design approach to OOD in their popular Designing Object-Oriented Software. In 1991 two very popular OOA/D books were published. One described the OMT method, Object-Oriented Modeling and Design, by Rumbaugh et al. The other described the Booch method, Object-Oriented Design with Applications. In 1992, Jacobson published the popular Object-Oriented Software Engineering, which promoted not only OOA/D, but use cases for requirements.
The UML started as an effort by Booch and Rumbaugh in 1994 not only to create a common notation, but to combine their two methods—the Booch and OMT methods. Thus, the first public draft of what today is the UML was presented as the Unified Method. They were soon joined at Rational Corporation by Ivar Jacobson, the creator of the Objectory method, and as a group came to be known as the three amigos. It was at this point that they decided to reduce the scope of their effort, and focus on a common diagramming notation—the UML—rather than a common method. This was not only a de-scoping effort; the Object Management Group (OMG, an industry standards body for OO-related standards) was convinced by various tool vendors that an open standard was needed. Thus, the process opened up, and an OMG task force chaired by Mary Loomis and Jim Odell organized the initial effort leading to UML 1.0 in 1997. Many others contributed to the UML, perhaps most notably Cris Kobryn, a leader in its ongoing refinement.
The UML has emerged as the de facto and de jure standard diagramming notation for object-oriented modeling, and has continued to be refined in new OMG UML versions, available at www.omg.org or www.uml.org.