Nik Boyd
Nik Boyd is the designer and developer of Hoot Smalltalk, and its predecessor Bistro Smalltalk. Hoot Smalltalk integrates the best features of both Smalltalk and Java. Nik has been designing and developing object-oriented software systems since 1987.
His research and development activities include programming language design, software development tools, software architecture, software metaphors, design patterns, refactoring, requirements formulation, and alignment with business objectives.
Since the late 1990s, Nik has developed the EDUCE process for software requirements capture and analysis. EDUCE explores the natural language statements that typically describe business problems, fosters the adoption of an ubiquitous language shared by all team members, and derives conceptual models and then software models progressively from such natural language statement analysis.
Due to its otherwise labor intensive process, EDUCE is supported by the adjunct tool Syntopica. Syntopica was used to generate a conceptual model web site for a simplified sample problem domain.
This site educery covers topics related to and surrounding Nik’s technical work, especially software design, language(s) both natural and designed, and what Alistair Cockburn has colorfully named “computational rhetoric”, and the metaphors used in software design.
There are two main themes for Nik’s research efforts:
While seemingly simpler, making ideas sharable in some systematic way turns out to be more difficult. While EDUCE offers systematic ways of making ideas sharable and comparable, there are still many challenges: finding distinct viewpoints and appropriate bounded contexts within which terms and statements are understood, finding and growing institutional support for EDUCE in practice, and more.
There’s a clear synergy between Hoot Smalltalk and EDUCE: Smalltalk lends itself to modeling language patterns used in problem and solution descriptions. Hoot Smalltalk extends these ideas into packaged software products layered on the Java ecosystem.