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

Fuctional Programming Principles in Scala - Getting Started

Sometime back I registered for the Functional Programming Principles in Scala , on Coursera. I have been meaning to learn Scala from a while, but have been putting it on the back burner because of other commitments. But  when I saw this course being offered by Martin Odersky, on Coursera , I just had to enroll in it. This course is a 7 week course. I will blog my learning experience and notes here for the next seven weeks (well actually six, since the course started on Sept 18th). The first step was to install the required tools: JDK - Since this is my work machine, I already have a couple of JDK's installed SBT - SBT is the Scala Build Tool. Even though I have not looked into it in detail, it seems like a replacement for Maven. I am sure we will use it for several things, however upto now I only know about two uses for it - to submit assignments (which must be a feature added by the course team), and to start the Scala console. Installed sbt from here , and added the path

Five Reasons Why Your Product Needs an Awesome User Guide

Photo Credit: Peter Merholz ( Creative Commons 2.0 SA License ) A user guide is essentially a book-length document containing instructions for installing, using or troubleshooting a hardware or software product. A user guide can be very brief - for example, only 10 or 20 pages or it can be a full-length book of 200 pages or more. -- prismnet.com As engineers, we give a lot of importance to product design, architecture, code quality, and UX. However, when it comes to the user manual, we often only manage to pay lip service. This is not good. A usable manual is as important as usable software because it is the first line of help for the user and the first line of customer service for the organization. Any organization that prides itself on great customer service must have an awesome user manual for the product. In the spirit of listicles - here are at least five reasons why you should have an awesome user manual! Enhance User Satisfaction In my fourteen years as a

Inheritance vs. composition depending on how much is same and how much differs

I am reading the excellent Django book right now. In the 4th chapter on Django templates , there is an example of includes and inheritance in Django templates. Without going into details about Django templates, the include is very similar to composition where we can include the text of another template for evaluation. Inheritance in Django templates works in a way similar to object inheritance. Django templates can specify certain blocks which can be redefined in subtemplates. The subtemplates use the rest of the parent template as is. Now we have all learned that inheritance is used when we have a is-a relationship between classes, and composition is used when we have a contains-a relationship. This is absolutely right, but while reading about Django templates, I just realized another pattern in these relationships. This is really simple and perhaps many of you may have already have had this insight... We use inheritance when we want to allow reuse of the bulk of one object in other