This is the biggie, the paper that made my name (and to a lesser extent Ward's, since he was already a little famous). I got my name first on the paper because of our rule that whoever wrote the first draft of a paper got to put his name first. This has caused considered confusion since then, with people crediting me as the inventor of CRC, or telling Ward how exciting it must have been for him to work with me.

There are a couple of stories about this paper. First, the title. Ward and I wanted to be very careful not to claim more for CRC than we could prove. We knew it was good for teaching “object-think,” so that's the approach we took in the paper, the one single point we pushed. We deliberately understated what we thought the impact would be, leaving it to our readers to extrapolate to making CRC cards into a design or analysis technique. We spent at least an hour on the phone polishing the title, and the result pleases me as much now as it did then.

Another story- I missed OOPSLA '89, waiting for the arrival of Lincoln Curtis, child number two. I had no idea of the impact of this paper. Then I attended OOPSLA '90 in Ottawa. I was in a “Design and Analysis” BOF. The biggies were all there: Booch, Constantine, Yourdon.