Mentoring object-oriented projects

In mentoring, an experienced person (the mentor) undertakes to guide a less experienced person (the "mentee") in the same or similar field. Mentoring can effectively bring an organization up to speed with new technology. What loosely distinguishes mentoring from training is that the latter is something often associated with a classroom. With mentoring, the learning happens on the job: a mentor educates by continuously hand-holding the mentee on the latter's tasks. Of course, in any real situation the education process must involve a judicious and inseparable mix of training and mentoring, with the same person often performing both roles. You can apply mentoring to people in your organization or even in a customer organization; the article focuses on the former. Mentors are particularly crucial for an organization learning object orientation. The author presents lessons learned from his experiences as a mentor on object oriented application development projects. He attempts to generalize his observations and present them as succinct, shop-usable advice, not just for the mentor but for the mentee as well.