Richard Pawson

Richard's career in IT started in 1977 working for Commodore, when he claims to have been the very first person in Europe to have written and run any program in a Microsoft language. He spent several years as a high tech journalist and broadcaster, with the dubious distinction of having been interviewed on television by such high-tech luminaries as Terry Wogan, Chris Tarrant, Alan Titchmarsh and Suzy Quatro!

He spent 14 years with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) latterly as a Vice President and Global Director of Research, specialising in the design of architectures to support business agility. He has a BSc in Engineering Science and a PhD in Computer Science - his thesis being on the 'Naked Objects pattern'. In 2003 he started Naked Objects Group to provide software frameworks that supported the pattern. Richard (a keen but not-very-good rower) lives in Henley on Thames, in a house that he designed using Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

Presentation: "Large-scale pure OO at the Irish Government"

Track: Design and Objects 2011

Time: Friday 15:35 - 16:35

Location: Elizabeth Windsor, Fifth Floor

Abstract:

The Department of Social Protection (DSP) in Ireland is responsible for administering all state pensions, unemployment benefit and many other social benefit schemes - an enterprise that has seen dramatic, if unwanted, growth in recent times. It is progressively replacing all its huge mainframe-based enterprise systems with a brand new architecture. Unusually, at a time when 'service-oriented architecture' was all the rage, the DSP opted instead for a pure object-oriented architecture - and theirs is now very possibly the largest scale pure-OO system anywhere in the world.

Richard Pawson, who has been involved with the DSP for 10 years will present the business challenges that the DSP faced, the reasoning behind the decision to go for pure OO, the many technical hurdles that were faced along the way, and the results ('warts and all') - now that multiple applications are running live under the new architecture. Keywords: objects, domain-driven design, agile architecture, agile development, test-driven; Suitable for: Architects, Development Managers, Modellers