Today I happened upon a notable source. Ed Yourdon is writing once again about structured analysis. According to Ed,

"This is an update, condensation, and pragmatic revision of my 1989 tome, Modern Structured Analysis, which is still employed by malicious professors to torture innocent students in universities around the world—the decision to update the material, and to rewrite what was probably far too ponderous a tome (672 pages) even in the days when people actually had enough time to read books printed on dead trees—[is based on the fact that] today, we’re too busy to spend much time thinking about anything, and we’re also far too busy to read more than a couple hundred pages of the bare essentials on any topic. What we want is just enough ... "

Ed plans on completing his book in 2007. There are a handful of chapters available now including one on Data Flow Diagrams and another on Process Specifications (which shows many different ways to represent what’s going inside a bubble on a data flow diagram). At OOPSLA last year I had the pleasure of hearing stories from Ed including how he’d been recently asked, "Aren’t you dead?" Ed’s very much alive. I’m not sure when I’ll next create any of these models, but I want to know about them from the source.