Tech Life of Recht

I’ve spent the last two days giving a course on basic programming and modeling techniques such as UML, design patterns, refactoring, and other related subjects. I think it’s the sixth time I do this, so it’s getting a little trivial. One of the more fun parts, however, is that I also spend a couple of hours on Color Modeling, most of the time on an exercise where the participants use colored post-it-notes to create a model of a business. They’ve more or less tried the same using just plain UML without using any particular methodology, and the difference is always striking: With Color Modeling, the result is quite consistent and contains more or less the same terms and classes. Without it, the models tend to be much more random, and they don’t really capture the essence of the business domain.
While pretty much everybody at the course can see that it can be a good idea to use Color Modeling, almost nobody actually does it afterwards. Personally, I feel that designs based on Color Modeling are much more consistent with the actual problem domain, so it’s somewhat hard to understand why it’s not more widely known (it’s extremely rare that I run into developers who know about the technique).

I know that Color Modeling is not the answer to everything, and that it has its downsides too. However, it strikes me as very strange that just about no developers I know actually know any reusable modeling technique which results in consistent models. Why is this? Modeling is hard, so why is there not any focus on this? It might be an educational issue – when I was at university, I was taught the only other technique I know: Find all the things in the system – these become classes. Find all the actions these things perform – these become the methods on the classes. And that’s more or less it. And isn’t that just a little saddening?