Secrets has been quite a long project (3 years) and is the most challenging project that my wife Ila and I have attempted. Initially, we thought we would put together a short book of OO analysis and design examples to complement our book "UML 2 and the Unified Process". We've had lots of requests for such a book for many years now, and we thought we could put something together very quickly. Interestingly, there isn't really a good worked example out there in print (at least not that we know of), so there was a real gap in the market and a clear need that we could address. However, when I started writing that book, I found that as I was creating the models, I was making all kinds of analysis decisions. It occurred to me that whilst a simple worked example book would be valuable, what would really be valuable would be a book in which I described how I was coming to those decisions. So a vision for a very different book was born. That book is "Secrets of Analysis".
Writing Secrets was a very different proposition to either of my other two books.
UML 2 and the Unified Process was quite straightforward. I have a very successful UML/UP course that I have been giving for many years, and the project involved turning that into a text.
Enterprise Patterns was much more challenging. In fact, it involved taking patterns of business objects that we had used again and again over the years and turning them into reusable patterns. This also involved MDA enabling them, and extending UML and pattern technology to support meta patterns. I might go into more detail about this in a later post.
Secrets, however, was all about introspection. Looking at the actual mental processes of the analyst (myself), formalizing those, and then presenting them in a didactic framework so that they were easy to assimilate. Fortunately, after 10 years as a Zen monk, such introspection comes naturally to me. Also, Bandler's original formulation of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), General Semantics, information theory and semiotics provided a natural framework for expressing our ideas. However, as you might guess, such a process is so unknown and so open-ended that we greatly underestimated the time the work would take.
It's been a real adventure. Not only do I have the book to show for it, but I now understand my own analysis skills in a way I never thought I would. Also, I think the process of dissecting those skills has made me a better analyst.
