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THE LAWS OF SOFTWARE PROCESS
perhaps programming languages, generate so much patriotic fervor on the
part of their adherents and emotion in their defense. Yet many of the meth-
odology differences were slight, even cosmetic. Early CASE tools such as
Excelerator boasted that they supported both the Yourdon and the Gane-
Sarson conventions of “Structured Analysis.” In reality, what these tools
did was convert all circular “process” icons (Yourdon convention) in the
“Data Flow Diagram” graphical models into rounded-corner squares (Gane-
Sarson convention). The real difference between the two methodologies
was actually related to the rate of functional decomposition, which is a
thought process, not a notational convention. Nevertheless, each camp
had its ...