Educators and Consultants as Mentors

Educators and consultants are often in a mentor role - their goal is to assist someone who is doing a software development task, in a way that improves that person's ability to do the task unaided in the future. Mentoring is a hard job, requiring a lot of patience and an understanding of "people issues". This paper presents some ideas on how to face the challenges of the mentoring process. These ideas should be helpful both tot he academic community and to consultants/trainers in industry. The first part of the paper presents some of the basic issues: some of the categories of obstacles to understanding that mentors must surmount. The second part presents some specific tips for object oriented design mentoring.