This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Deep Models
Useful models seldom lie on the surface. As we come to understand the domain and the needs of the application, we usually discard superficial model elements that seemed important in the beginning, or we shift their perspective. Subtle abstractions emerge that would not have occurred to us at the outset but that pierce to the heart of the matter.
The preceding example is loosely based on one of the projects that I'll be drawing on for several examples throughout the book: a container shipping system. The examples in this book will be kept accessible to non-shipping experts. But on a real project, where continuous learning prepares the team members, models of utility and clarity often call for sophistication both in the domain and in modeling technique.
On that project, because a shipment begins with the act of booking cargo, we developed a model that allowed us to describe the cargo, its itinerary, and so on. This was all necessary and useful, yet the domain experts felt dissatisfied. There was a way they looked at their business that we were missing.
Eventually, after months of knowledge crunching, we realized that the handling of cargo, the physical loading and unloading, the movements from place to place, was largely carried out by subcontractors or by operational people in the company. In the view of our shipping experts, there was a series of transfers of responsibility between parties. A process governed that transfer of legal and practical responsibility, from the shipper to some local carrier, from one carrier to another, and finally to the consignee. Often, the cargo would sit in a warehouse while important steps were being taken. At other times, the cargo would move through complex physical steps that were not relevant to the shipping company's business decisions. Rather than the logistics of the itinerary, what came to the fore were legal documents such as the bill of lading, and processes leading to the release of payments.
This deeper view of the shipping business did not lead to the removal of the Itinerary object, but the model changed profoundly. Our view of shipping changed from moving containers from place to place, to transferring responsibility for cargo from entity to entity. Features for handling these transfers of responsibility were no longer awkwardly attached to loading operations, but were supported by a model that came out of an understanding of the significant relationship between those operations and those responsibilities.
Knowledge crunching is an exploration, and you can't know where you will end up.