Ray Schneider

mailto:rschneid@bridgewater.edu

Ray Schneider is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department of Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, Virginia in the lovely Shenandoah Valley. Formerly the Director of Engineering at ComSonics Inc. in Harrisonburg, VA, Ray completed his doctorate in Information Technology at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA in May of 2001. He taught at James Madison University for ten years as an adjunct professor and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Computer Science in the academic year 2001-2002 before joining the Bridgewater College faculty. Ray has taught Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Personal Software Productivity, and Patterns and Architectures using Coplien's 1st Pattern Book as well as the GoFs? book and is very interested in Agile methodologies.

Ray reviewed ExtremeProgrammingExplained in the March 2002 V4 Issue 2 of Software Quality Professional, a publication of the American Society for Quality. More recently Ray and Pieter Botman reviewed the entire Extreme Programming book series. See http://www.asq.org/pub/sqp/past/vol5_issue1/botman.html

Ray has over thirty-five years experience in research and development of both hardware and software and you can visit his webpage at Bridgewater College at http://www.bridgewater.edu/~rschneid

For more about Ray's patterns on the WikiWikiWeb go to RaysWikiPatterns.

Moved rfom WhoAreYou?...

WhoAreYou? is a question which we each must ask of ourselves and of others.

When I was a young physicist, just starting out, I had an interesting conversation with an associate. We were walking across a hangar at the Naval Air Development Center, where I worked at the time. The topic was the management of complex activities which are beyond the complete understanding of any single individual. At the center, we develop large scale avionics systems, pioneering such systems as the P3C Orion ASW system - the first airborne, fully integrated aircraft with a central computer (at least that I know of).

His response was: My father says it's all a game of Whom Do You Trust? My own father, who was a Rear Admiral in the Navy, told me once that the first thing he did when he assumed a new command was to find someone who already knew the place inside out, whom he trusted, and made him his adjutant. By doing this, he guaranteed a smooth transition of power, because the adjutant already knew how the organization ran. That's an instance of WhomDoYouTrust and to answer that question you must be able to answer the inherently prior question WhoAreYou?. [One of the amusing things sometimes is how things transmogrify on a Wiki. The original form of the story was Who Do You Trust and some language Nazi came by and "fixed" it. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that it was originally said as "Who do you trust?" Oh well ... not important, just annoying.]

Building an answer to WhoAreYou? involves adopting principles and standards that you trust, often by consciously modeling those who have gone before and whom you admire. The patterns which relate to this are RiverOfTime, ShouldersOfGiants, SaintsAndHeroes, GhostsInUs, and undoubtedly some I have not thought of. -- RaySchneider

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