Analysis and Design

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The
object-oriented paradigm is a new and different way of thinking about
programming and many folks have trouble at first knowing how to approach a
project. Now that you know that everything is supposed to be an object, you can
create a “good” design, one that will take advantage of all the
benefits that OOP has to offer.

Books
on OOP analysis and design are coming out of the woodwork. Most of these books
are filled with lots of long words, awkward prose and important-sounding
pronouncements.
[9]
I come away thinking the book would be better as a chapter or at the most a
very short book and feeling annoyed that this process couldn’t be
described simply and directly. (It disturbs me that people who purport to
specialize in managing complexity have such trouble writing clear and simple
books.) After all, the whole point of OOP is to make the process
of software development easier, and although it would seem to threaten the
livelihood of those of us who consult because things are complex, why not make
it simple? So, hoping I’ve built a healthy skepticism within you, I shall
endeavor to give you my own perspective on analysis and design in as few
paragraphs as possible.

Staying
on course

That
said, if you’re looking at a methodology that contains tremendous detail
and suggests many steps and documents, it’s still difficult to know when
to stop. Keep in mind what you’re trying to discover:

  1. What
    are the objects? (How do you partition your project into its component parts?)
  2. What
    are their interfaces? (What messages do you need to be able to send to each
    object?)
If
you come up with nothing more than the objects and their interfaces then you
can write a program. For various reasons you might need more descriptions and
documents than this, but you can’t really get away with any less.

Phase
0: Let’s make a plan

You
might also decide at this phase that some additional process structure is
necessary but not the whole nine yards. Understandably enough, some programmers
like to work in “vacation mode” in which no structure is imposed on
the process of developing their work: “It will be done when it’s
done.” This can be appealing for awhile, but I’ve found that having
a few milestones along the way helps to focus and galvanize your efforts around
those milestones instead of being stuck with the single goal of “finish
the project.” In addition, it divides the project into more bite-sized
pieces and make it seem less threatening.

Phase
1: What are we making?

In
the previous generation of program design (procedural design), this would be
called “creating the
requirements
analysis

and
system
specification
.”
These, of course, were places to get lost: intimidatingly-named documents that
could become big projects in their own right. Their intention was good,
however. The requirements analysis says “Make a list of the guidelines we
will use to know when the job is done and the customer is satisfied.” The
system specification says “Here’s a description of
what
the program will do (not
how)
to satisfy the requirements.” The requirements analysis is really a
contract between you and the customer (even if the customer works within your
company or is some other object or system). The system specification is a
top-level exploration into the problem and in some sense a discovery of whether
it can be done and how long it will take. Since both of these will require
consensus among people, I think it’s best to keep them as bare as
possible – ideally, to lists and basic diagrams – to save time. You
might have other constraints that require you to expand them into bigger
documents.

You
try to discover a full set of use-cases for your system, and once you’ve
done that you’ve got the core of what the system is supposed to do. The
nice thing about focusing on use-cases is that they always bring you back to
the essentials and keep you from drifting off into issues that aren’t
critical for getting the job done. That is, if you have a full set of use-cases
you can describe your system and move onto the next phase. You probably
won’t get it all figured out perfectly at this phase, but that’s
OK. Everything will reveal itself in the fullness of time, and if you demand a
perfect system specification at this point you’ll get stuck.

It
helps to kick-start this phase by describing the system in a few paragraphs and
then looking for nouns and verbs. The nouns become the objects and the verbs
become the methods in the object interfaces. You’ll be surprised at how
useful a tool this can be; sometimes it will accomplish the lion’s share
of the work for you.

Although
it’s a black art, at this point some kind of
scheduling
can be quite useful. You now have an overview of what you’re building so
you’ll probably be able to get some idea of how long it will take. A lot
of factors come into play here: if you estimate a long schedule then the
company might not decide to build it, or a manager might have already decided
how long the project should take and will try to influence your estimate. But
it’s best to have an honest schedule from the beginning and deal with the
tough decisions early. There have been a lot of attempts to come up with
accurate scheduling techniques (like techniques to predict the stock market),
but probably the best approach is to rely on your experience and intuition. Get
a gut feeling for how long it will really take, then double that and add 10
percent. Your gut feeling is probably correct; you
can
get something working in that time. The “doubling” will turn that
into something decent, and the 10 percent will deal with final polishing and
details. However you want to explain it, and regardless of the moans and
manipulations that happen when you reveal such a schedule, it just seems to
work out that way.

Phase
2: How will we build it?

The
most successful consulting experiences I’ve had when coming up with an
initial design involves standing in front of a team, who hadn’t built an
OOP project before, and drawing objects on a whiteboard. We talked about how
the objects should communicate with each other, and erased some of them and
replaced them with other objects. The team (who knew what the project was
supposed to do) actually created the design; they “owned” the
design rather than having it given to them. All I was doing was guiding the
process by asking the right questions, trying out the assumptions and taking
the feedback from the team to modify those assumptions. The true beauty of the
process was that the team learned how to do object-oriented design not by
reviewing abstract examples, but by working on the one design that was most
interesting to them at that moment: theirs.

Phase
3: Let’s build it!

If
you’re reading this book you’re probably a programmer, so now
we’re at the part you’ve been trying to get to. By following a plan
– no matter how simple and brief – and coming up with design
structure before coding, you’ll discover that things fall together far
more easily than if you dive in and start hacking, and this provides a great
deal of satisfaction. Getting code to run and do what you want is fulfilling,
even like some kind of drug if you look at the obsessive behavior of some
programmers. But it’s my experience that coming up with an elegant
solution is deeply satisfying at an entirely different level; it feels closer
to art than technology. And
elegance
always pays off; it’s not a frivolous pursuit. Not only does it give you
a program that’s easier to build and debug, but it’s also easier to
understand and maintain, and that’s where the financial value lies.

Phase
4: Iteration

This
is the point in the development cycle that has traditionally been called
“maintenance,” a catch-all term that can mean everything from
“getting it to work the way it was really supposed to in the first
place” to “adding features that the customer forgot to mention
before” to the more traditional “fixing the bugs that show
up” and “adding new features as the need arises.” So many
misconceptions have been applied to the term “maintenance” that it
has taken on a slightly deceiving quality, partly because it suggests that
you’ve actually built a pristine program and that all you need to do is
change parts, oil it and keep it from rusting. Perhaps there’s a better
term to describe what’s going on.

What
it means to “get it right” isn’t just that the program works
according to the requirements and the use-cases. It also means that the
internal structure of the code makes sense to you, and feels like it fits
together well, with no awkward syntax, oversized objects or ungainly exposed
bits of code. In addition, you must have some sense that the program structure
will survive the changes that it will inevitably go through during its
lifetime, and that those changes can be made easily and cleanly. This is no
small feat. You must not only understand what you’re building, but also
how the program will evolve (what I call the
vector
of change
).
Fortunately, object-oriented programming languages are particularly adept at
supporting this kind of continuing modification – the boundaries created
by the objects are what tend to keep the structure from breaking down. They are
also what allow you to make changes that would seem drastic in a procedural
program without causing earthquakes throughout your code. In fact, support for
iteration might be the most important benefit of OOP.

Iteration
also occurs when you build a system, see that it matches your requirements and
then discover it wasn’t actually what you wanted. When you see the
system, you realize you want to solve a different problem. If you think this
kind of iteration is going to happen, then you owe it to yourself to build your
first version as quickly as possible so you can find out if it’s what you
want.

Iteration
is closely tied to incremental
development
.
Incremental development means that you start with the core of your system and
implement it as a framework upon which to build the rest of the system piece by
piece. Then you start adding features one at a time. The trick to this is in
designing a framework that will accommodate all the features you plan to add to
it. (See Chapter 16 for more insight into this issue.) The advantage is that
once you get the core framework working, each feature you add is like a small
project in itself rather than part of a big project. Also, new features that
are incorporated later in the development or maintenance phases can be added
more easily. OOP supports incremental development because if your program is
designed well, your increments will turn out to be discreet objects or groups
of objects.

Plans
pay off

Of
course you wouldn’t build a house without a lot of carefully-drawn plans.
If you build a deck or a dog house, your plans won’t be so elaborate but
you’ll still probably start with some kind of sketches to guide you on
your way. Software development has gone to extremes. For a long time, people
didn’t have much structure in their development, but then big projects
began failing. In reaction, we ended up with methodologies that had an
intimidating amount of structure and detail. These were too scary to use
– it looked like you’d spend all your time writing documents and no
time programming. (This was often the case.) I hope that what I’ve shown
you here suggests a middle path – a sliding scale. Use an approach that
fits your needs (and your personality). No matter how minimal you choose to
make it,
some
kind of plan will make a big improvement in your project as opposed to no plan
at all. Remember that, by some estimates, over 50 percent of projects fail.


[9]
The best introduction is still Grady Booch’s
Object-Oriented
Design with Applications
,
2
nd
edition, Wiley & Sons 1996. His insights are clear and his prose is
straightforward, although his notations are needlessly complex for most
designs. (You can easily get by with a subset.)

[10]
This
is something like “rapid prototyping,” where you were supposed to
build a quick-and-dirty version so that you could learn about the system, and
then throw away your prototype and build it right. The trouble with rapid
prototyping is that people didn’t throw away the prototype, but instead
built upon it. Combined with the lack of structure in procedural programming,
this often leads to messy systems that are expensive to maintain.

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