Skip to main content

Ending notes on software design series

Software design is all about decontructing a system into manageable units, identifying relationships among them and getting the units to interact to fulfill system requirements. To become a good object oriented designer, you first have to replace the "procedural mindset" with an "object oriented" one. That, however is not as simple as it sounds. The best way to get there is by practice, lot's of it. Take every opportunity to create a good design.

When creating an entire system, think about the classes, their relationships, and interactions. When creating a class, think of what responsibilities it should fulfill. What should the API be like? How does it relate to other classes? When creating methods, think about the method signature and about the code in the method. Does the method do one and only one thing? What exceptions should it throw? Is is intuitive and easy to use? At whatever level you are creating the system, you can always think of design. Remember, there is a lot of power in the process of understanding, reflecting, practicing, and writing. Use it to learn continuously.

The natural progression after understanding basic design principles is understanding design patterns and then enterprise architecture. Start with the "Gang Of Four's" design patterns and then move towards more complex topics.

A few good resources for for reference:

 

I hope you have enjoyed this course and found it useful. Good luck... and wishing you have a very successful and enjoyable career in software development.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Running your own one person company

Recently there was a post on PuneTech on mom's re-entering the IT work force after a break. Two of the biggest concerns mentioned were : Coping with vast advances (changes) in the IT landscape Balancing work and family responsibilities Since I have been running a one person company for a good amount of time, I suggested that as an option. In this post I will discuss various aspects of running a one person company. Advantages: You have full control of your time. You can choose to spend as much or as little time as you would like. There is also a good chance that you will be able to decide when you want to spend that time. You get to work on something that you enjoy doing. Tremendous work satisfaction. You have the option of working from home. Disadvantages: It can take a little while for the work to get set, so you may not be able to see revenues for some time. It takes a huge amount of discipline to work without a boss, and without deadlines. You will not get the benefits (insuranc...

Testing Groovy domain classes

If you are trying to test Grails domain class constraints by putting your unit test cases in the 'test/unit' directory, then your tests will fail because the domain objects will not have the 'valdate' method. This can be resolved in two ways: Place the test cases inside test/integration (which will slow things down) Use the method 'mockForConstraintsTests(Trail)' to create mock method in your domain class and continue writing your test cases in 'test/unit' What follows is some example code around this finding. I am working on a Groovy on Grails project for a website to help programmers keep up and refresh their skills. I started with some domain classes and then moved on to write some unit tests. When we create a Grails project using grails create-app , it creates several directories, one of which is a directory called 'test' for holding unit tests. This directory contains two directories, 'unit', and 'integration' for unit and ...

Planning a User Guide - Part 4/5 - Get Your Toolbox Together

Photo by  Fleur Treurniet  on  Unsplash In the previous post , I had discussed how to organize the team for creating your software's user manual. With the team ready, the next step is to select the tools. Working with the right technical writing tools is as important in technical writing as it is in building software. The right tools will help you be more organized, productive, and accurate in your work.  In software, we use an IDEs, testing tools, and version control tools to manage our work. In technical writing, at a bare minimum, we use a content authoring tool, an automated grammar checker, and visual tools to assist us in our work.  I'll discuss various tools that are available in the market, link to comparisons, and share my opinion to help you make the right choice. Help Authoring Tools A Help Authoring Tool (HAT) offers several features that go beyond simple word processing software for writing technical documents. HATs s...