The Proliferation of Object-Oriented Methods

The first few years of the 1990s saw blossoming of around fifty various object oriented methods. This proliferation is a sign of great importance of object oriented technology, but it is also fruit of a multitude of interpretations of accurately what an object is. The drawback of this plenty of methodologies is that it causes confusion, which leads users to adopt a 'wait and see' attitude that limits progress made by methods. The best way of testing something is still to deploy it, methods are not cast in stone - methods evolve in response to comments from their users.

Fortunately, a close look at dominant methods allows extraction of a consensus around common concepts. The main feature of objects, shared by numerous methods are articulated around concepts of class, association (explained by James Rumbaugh), partition into subsystems (by Grady Booch) and around expression of requirements based on studying interaction between users and systems (Ivar Jacobson's use cases).

At last, well-deployed methods, for example Booch and OMT (Object Modelling Technique), were imposed by experience and adopted methodology elements which were most appreciated by the users.