The key to making object technology work isn't technology. So what is it? This panel will cover a lot of the "soft" issues about dealing with people and teams. It's partly about managing software development, and mostly about doing it.

It is difficult to introduce both novice and experienced procedural programmers to the anthropomorphic perspective necessary for object-oriented design. We introduce CRC cards, which characterize objects by class name, responsibilities, and collaborators, as a way of giving learners a direct experience of objects. We have found this approach successful in teaching novice programmers the concepts of objects, and in introducing experienced programmers to complicated existing designs.

We introduce a notation for diagramming the message sending dialogue that takes place between objects participating in an object-oriented computation. Our representation takes a global point of view which emphasizes the collaboration between objects implementing the behavior of individuals. We illustrate the diagram's usage with examples drawn from the Smalltalk-80™ virtual image. We also describe a mechanism for automatic construction of diagrams from Smalltalk code.