Of Software Development, Design, Process, and Tools, etc ...
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I'm Steve Palmer. I'm a software development consultant. I work for Borland (www.borland.com) where I specialise in object-oriented, component-based, and service-oriented software design, agile software processes, and use of Borland's Together product. Over the years I have written a number of short articles on software development topics. Some of these have been sent out as technical newsletter issues, others have been published somewhere on the internet, etc. I have collected these articles together on these pages, or links to them where they are still available on other web sites. They are organised into three rough categories:As this is my personal website, the views expressed on this site are my own and not necessarily those of Borland or any of my previous employers. At the start of my career, I spent 4 years developing software at Instem for the electricity generation, transmission and distribution industry in the UK. I then spent six years working on business process automation and management information systems in Singapore for a government agency and a leading regional bank. More recently, I have worked as a software development consultant, independently, at TogetherSoft, and now Borland (www.borland.com). |
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In Singapore, I was privileged to work for a number of years with Jeff De Luca (www.nebulon.com) and Peter Coad (www.pcoad.com) on, what was then, the largest system written in the Java programming language (java.sun.com) in South East Asia. This was also the first project to use Peter's, 'Modeling in Color' technique and Jeff's Feature-Driven Development (FDD) process. My thinking about software development have been influenced by FDD and 'Modeling in Color' ever since. |
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I have started to write up more of my notes, collected
from applying
and teaching 'modeling in color'. Of course, being English, I
spell it differently; modelling in colour. As a set of
strategies and patterns for building object-oriented,
analysis and design models, I have found it to be unsurpassed. More on modelling in colour... |
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During my time at TogetherSoft, I was
also given the opportunity to write a book describing Feature-Driven
Development (FDD) as I understood it at the time. It is one of eight
books (last time I counted) that form the Coad Series published
by Prentice Hall PTR (www.informit.com). More on A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development... |
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Although I started my career programming in FORTRAN and C, I graduated to C++ in the mid-1990's, from where I escaped to Java in 1997. Along the way I picked up enough SQL, and HTML / XML / JSP to be very dangerous anywhere near relational databases and web-based user interfaces. Java is still the programming language I work with the most, although I have gained a fair amount of experience recently with more esoteric stuff like Object Constraint Language (OCL) (www.omg.org...) and Query View Transform (QVT) (www.omg.org...). Most of my time is spent teaching and helping teams with object-oriented, component-based, or service-oriented analysis and design work, usually using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Borland Together. My other 1990's software developer 'qualifications' include liking rock music, having read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings from cover to cover multiple times (including the appendices), being addicted to old sci-fi shows like StarTrek, and surviving for far too many years on a diet consisting largely of coffee, pizza, burgers, chocolate, and cola. You can contact me by e-mail at stephen.palmer at step-10.com (substituting @ for at of course). There are a considerable number of people called Steve Palmer. If you are wondering if I am the Steve Palmer that you know, check my short fact page to find out. This web site is called SteP 10 because I traded under that name for a few years as an independent consultant before joining Borland. At the time, Step 10 stood for Stephen Palmer 10 years after graduating from Keele University. Now it is closer to 19 years. That means I will soon clock up my second decade in the software development industry and will really start to bore people with tales of tape drives, 16 bit-processors, and working in octal, etc., etc. |
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