Sorry for the late reply, but I had trouble posting to the right
group (resolved now). The discussion has moved on, but I'll post my
message anyway!
Derek,
I have done some research on program plans, and I never asked
people what their plans were. As a psychologist, I know that to really
find out what is going on one examines behaviour, not report.
If one videotapes programmers in the act of program generation
(design and coding), then one can see that lines of code are added in two
main orders:
1. Forward procedural order. A plan schema is retrieved and the lines of
code appear in the retrieved, procedural order.
2. Backward plan order. Starting with the goal of the plan, lines are
added to the code by tracing back through the prerequiste plan structure.
With careful experimentation, it is easy to see a switch from
backward plan creation to forward schema retrieval as expertise
increases. Plan knowledge provides the base on which everything else is
built; they show the act of knowledge creation. They thus provide a very
fine grained explanation for design strategies. A more complex story has
to be told for OO design of course, by showing how a plan is spread among
various classes. Software design is, of course, far more complex than I
have mentioned here. Plans and planning are discussed in more detail in
my published work (see web site for references).
Dr. Robert Rist
Faculty of Information Technology
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123 Broadway, Sydney, NSW 2007 Australia
http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~rist
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