Sally Shlaer
Encyclopedia
Sally Shlaer was the co-author of the Shlaer-Mellor
approach to software development and co-founder of Project Technology Inc.
With Stephen J. Mellor
, she founded Project Technology Inc. in 1985, with the goal of making software development a rational, controllable, predictable, engineering process. As President, Sally strove to make Project Technology “a place where people could do their best work.” Their initial ideas developed rapidly into what we know today as object and state modeling, domain separation, recursive design and translational (as opposed to elaborative) implementation. They defined and formalized their approach and disseminated it in a number of training seminars, books and articles. For many years they visualized tools that could “automate and execute” domain-separated models of requirements and by the mid-1990s they began to see the realization of that dream.
Sally’s final years were clouded by chronic ill health. Although this marred her productivity, she was still able to carry out important research on recursive design. Should her writings from this time ever be published, they may prove to be the masterwork of her career.
Recalls long-time friend and colleague, Meilir Page-Jones: “Sally presided over the closest thing to a software-engineering salon that I’ve ever known. She lived in what resembled a country farmhouse perched in the Berkeley foothills. Known by everyone simply as ‘The House’, it was home to a wonderful jolly muddle that Sally tried valiantly to control. I never knew who I’d find sitting around the big kitchen table: Neighbors, relatives, gardeners and world-famous methodologists would all drop by to partake of Sally and Steve’s superb cooking and hilarious conversation. Around and among it all would be an indeterminate number of cats and dogs in a kind of quantum cloud."
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1938, the daughter of Arthur and Naomi Slaughter, Sally moved to Phoenix at the age of 10. In 1960, she gained a BS in Mathematics at Stanford where she wrote her first software, implementing (in Fortran and assembler) code to reduce data volumes in experimental physics data.
After marrying, she moved to Austin, Texas and started her family. She then moved to Canberra, Australia and attended graduate school at Australia National University. Returning to the United States in 1965, she moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she designed and implemented (in SEL 810A assembler) a real-time, disk-based, multi-tasking operating system for an electron accelerator. This field of real-time and process-control software for fundamental applied physics was soon to become her hallmark. In the early 1970s, she had sole responsibility for the monitor and control software for the Los Alamos Biomedical Treatment Facility beam line. In 1977, she left Los Alamos to become software-project leader at Lawrence Berkeley Labs’ Biomedical Treatment Facility.
Two years later she took an equivalent position at LBL working on the Integrated Control System project for the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system. The mission of the ICS project was to investigate and eventually replace the unwieldy and unmaintainable software that controlled the subway at that time. It was at ICS that she first worked with Steve Mellor, who was then leader of the software-infrastructure group. Together they worked on new approaches to project management (including the project matrix) and they applied methodical rigor to the notoriously unruly realm of real-time software development. Their techniques paid huge dividends. In one now-legendary example, they showed how to replace the old Electrification subsystem, containing 70000 malfunctioning lines of Fortran and assembler, with just 2000 lines of clean, well-designed, working code.
Shlaer-Mellor
The Shlaer-Mellor method, developed by Sally Shlaer and Stephen Mellor, is one of a number of object-oriented analysis / object-oriented design methods which arrived in the late 1980s in response to established weaknesses in the existing structured analysis and structured design techniques in...
approach to software development and co-founder of Project Technology Inc.
With Stephen J. Mellor
Stephen J. Mellor
Stephen J. Mellor is a computer scientist, developer of the Shlaer-Mellor method and signatory to the Agile Manifesto.Together with Sally Shlaer he founded Project Technology in 1985. That company was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2004....
, she founded Project Technology Inc. in 1985, with the goal of making software development a rational, controllable, predictable, engineering process. As President, Sally strove to make Project Technology “a place where people could do their best work.” Their initial ideas developed rapidly into what we know today as object and state modeling, domain separation, recursive design and translational (as opposed to elaborative) implementation. They defined and formalized their approach and disseminated it in a number of training seminars, books and articles. For many years they visualized tools that could “automate and execute” domain-separated models of requirements and by the mid-1990s they began to see the realization of that dream.
Sally’s final years were clouded by chronic ill health. Although this marred her productivity, she was still able to carry out important research on recursive design. Should her writings from this time ever be published, they may prove to be the masterwork of her career.
Recalls long-time friend and colleague, Meilir Page-Jones: “Sally presided over the closest thing to a software-engineering salon that I’ve ever known. She lived in what resembled a country farmhouse perched in the Berkeley foothills. Known by everyone simply as ‘The House’, it was home to a wonderful jolly muddle that Sally tried valiantly to control. I never knew who I’d find sitting around the big kitchen table: Neighbors, relatives, gardeners and world-famous methodologists would all drop by to partake of Sally and Steve’s superb cooking and hilarious conversation. Around and among it all would be an indeterminate number of cats and dogs in a kind of quantum cloud."
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1938, the daughter of Arthur and Naomi Slaughter, Sally moved to Phoenix at the age of 10. In 1960, she gained a BS in Mathematics at Stanford where she wrote her first software, implementing (in Fortran and assembler) code to reduce data volumes in experimental physics data.
After marrying, she moved to Austin, Texas and started her family. She then moved to Canberra, Australia and attended graduate school at Australia National University. Returning to the United States in 1965, she moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she designed and implemented (in SEL 810A assembler) a real-time, disk-based, multi-tasking operating system for an electron accelerator. This field of real-time and process-control software for fundamental applied physics was soon to become her hallmark. In the early 1970s, she had sole responsibility for the monitor and control software for the Los Alamos Biomedical Treatment Facility beam line. In 1977, she left Los Alamos to become software-project leader at Lawrence Berkeley Labs’ Biomedical Treatment Facility.
Two years later she took an equivalent position at LBL working on the Integrated Control System project for the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system. The mission of the ICS project was to investigate and eventually replace the unwieldy and unmaintainable software that controlled the subway at that time. It was at ICS that she first worked with Steve Mellor, who was then leader of the software-infrastructure group. Together they worked on new approaches to project management (including the project matrix) and they applied methodical rigor to the notoriously unruly realm of real-time software development. Their techniques paid huge dividends. In one now-legendary example, they showed how to replace the old Electrification subsystem, containing 70000 malfunctioning lines of Fortran and assembler, with just 2000 lines of clean, well-designed, working code.
Publications
- Sally Shlaer, Stephen J. MellorStephen J. MellorStephen J. Mellor is a computer scientist, developer of the Shlaer-Mellor method and signatory to the Agile Manifesto.Together with Sally Shlaer he founded Project Technology in 1985. That company was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2004....
. Object Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World in Data. Prentice Hall, 1988. - Stephen J. MellorStephen J. MellorStephen J. Mellor is a computer scientist, developer of the Shlaer-Mellor method and signatory to the Agile Manifesto.Together with Sally Shlaer he founded Project Technology in 1985. That company was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2004....
, Sally Shlaer. Object Life Cycles: Modeling the World In States. Prentice Hall, 1991.