Chapter 7 – Design and Implementation

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Topics covered
Object-oriented design using the UML
Design patterns
Implementation issues
Open source development

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Design and implementation
Software design and implementation is the stage in the software
engineering process at which an executable software system is
developed.
Software design and implementation activities are invariably
inter-leaved.
◦ Software design is a creative activity in which you identify software
components and their relationships, based on a customer’s requirements.
◦ Implementation is the process of realizing the design as a program.

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Build or buy
In a wide range of domains, it is now possible to buy off-the-shelf
systems (COTS) that can be adapted and tailored to the users’
requirements.
◦ For example, if you want to implement a medical records system, you can
buy a package that is already used in hospitals. It can be cheaper and faster
to use this approach rather than developing a system in a conventional
programming language.

When you develop an application in this way, the design process

becomes concerned with how to use the configuration features of that
system to deliver the system requirements.

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Object-oriented design using the
UML

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An object-oriented design process
Structured object-oriented design processes involve developing a
number of different system models.
They require a lot of effort for development and maintenance of these
models and, for small systems, this may not be cost-effective.
However, for large systems developed by different groups design
models are an important communication mechanism.

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Process stages
There are a variety of different object-oriented design processes that
depend on the organization using the process.
Common activities in these processes include:
◦ Define the context and modes of use of the system;
◦ Design the system architecture;
◦ Identify the principal system objects;
◦ Develop design models;
◦ Specify object interfaces.

Process illustrated here using a design for a wilderness weather station.

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System context and
interactions
Understanding the relationships between the software that is being
designed and its external environment is essential for deciding how to
provide the required system functionality and how to structure the
system to communicate with its environment.
Understanding of the context also lets you establish the boundaries of
the system. Setting the system boundaries helps you decide what
features are implemented in the system being designed and what
features are in other associated systems.

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Context and interaction
models
A system context model is a structural model that demonstrates the
other systems in the environment of the system being developed.
An interaction model is a dynamic model that shows how the system
interacts with its environment as it is used.

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System context for the weather station

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Weather station use cases

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 Use case description—Report
weather
System Weather station
Use case Report weather
Actors Weather information system, Weather station
Description The weather station sends a summary of the weather data that has been
collected from the instruments in the collection period to the weather
information system. The data sent are the maximum, minimum, and average
ground and air temperatures; the maximum, minimum, and average air
pressures; the maximum, minimum, and average wind speeds; the total
rainfall; and the wind direction as sampled at five-minute intervals.
Stimulus The weather information system establishes a satellite communication link
with the weather station and requests transmission of the data.
Response The summarized data is sent to the weather information system.
Comments Weather stations are usually asked to report once per hour but this frequency
may differ from one station to another and may be modified in the future.

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Architectural design
Once interactions between the system and its environment
have been understood, you use this information for
designing the system architecture.
You identify the major components that make up the system and their
interactions, and then may organize the components using an
architectural pattern such as a layered or client-server model.
The weather station is composed of independent subsystems that
communicate by broadcasting messages on a common infrastructure.

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High-level architecture of the
weather station

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Architecture of data
collection system

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Object class identification
Identifying object classes is often a difficult part of object oriented
design.
There is no 'magic formula' for object identification. It relies on the
skill, experience
and domain knowledge of system designers.
Object identification is an iterative process. You are unlikely to get it
right first time.

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Approaches to identification
Use a grammatical approach based on a natural language
description of the system.
Base the identification on tangible things in the
application domain.
Use a behavioural approach and identify objects based on
what participates in what behaviour.
Use a scenario-based analysis. The objects, attributes and
methods in each scenario are identified.

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Weather station object
classes
Object class identification in the weather station system
may be based on the tangible hardware and data in the system:
◦ Ground thermometer, Anemometer, Barometer
◦ Application domain objects that are ‘hardware’ objects related to the
instruments in the system.
◦ Weather station
◦ The basic interface of the weather station to its environment. It therefore
reflects the interactions identified in the use-case model.
◦ Weather data
◦ Encapsulates the summarized data from the instruments.

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Weather station object
classes

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Design models
Design models show the objects and object classes and relationships
between these entities.
There are two kinds of design model:
◦ Structural models describe the static structure of the system in terms of
object classes and relationships.
◦ Dynamic models describe the dynamic interactions between objects.

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Examples of design models
Subsystem models that show logical groupings of objects
into coherent subsystems.
Sequence models that show the sequence of object
interactions.
State machine models that show how individual objects
change their state in response to events.
Other models include use-case models, aggregation
models, generalisation models, etc.

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Subsystem models

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Sequence diagram describing
data collection

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Weather station state
diagram

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Interface specification
•Object interfaces have to be specified so that the objects
and other components can be designed in parallel.
•Designers should avoid designing the interface
representation but should hide this in the object itself.
•Objects may have several interfaces which are viewpoints
on the methods provided.
•The UML uses class diagrams for interface specification but
Java may also be used.

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Weather station interfaces

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Design patterns

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Design patterns
A design pattern is a way of reusing abstract knowledge about a
problem and its solution.
A pattern is a description of the problem and the essence of its
solution.
It should be sufficiently abstract to be reused in different settings.
Pattern descriptions usually make use of object-oriented
characteristics such as inheritance and polymorphism.

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Patterns
Patterns and Pattern Languages are ways to describe best practices,
good designs, and capture experience in a way that it is possible for
others to reuse this experience.

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Pattern elements
Name
◦ A meaningful pattern identifier.

Problem description.
Solution description.
◦ Not a concrete design but a template for a design solution that can be
instantiated in different ways.

Consequences
◦ The results and trade-offs of applying the pattern.

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The Observer pattern
Name
◦ Observer.

Description
◦ Separates the display of object state from the object itself.

Problem description
◦ Used when multiple displays of state are needed.

Solution description
◦ See slide with UML description.

Consequences
◦ Optimisations to enhance display performance are impractical.

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Multiple displays using the
Observer pattern

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Design problems
To use patterns in your design, you need to recognize that any design
problem you are facing may have an associated pattern that can be
applied.
◦ Tell several objects that the state of some other object has changed
(Observer pattern).
◦ Tidy up the interfaces to a number of related objects that have often been
developed incrementally (Façade pattern).
◦ Provide a standard way of accessing the elements in a collection, irrespective
of how that collection is implemented (Iterator pattern).
◦ Allow for the possibility of extending the functionality of an existing class at
run-time (Decorator pattern).

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 Implementation issues

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Implementation issues
Focus here is not on programming, although this is obviously important,
but on other implementation issues that are often not covered in
programming texts:
◦ Reuse Most modern software is constructed by reusing existing components
or systems. When you are developing software, you should make as much
use as possible of existing code.
◦ Configuration management During the development process, you have to
keep track of the many different versions of each software component in a
configuration management system.
◦ Host-target development Production software does not usually execute on
the same computer as the software development environment. Rather, you
develop it on one computer (the host system) and execute it on a separate
computer (the target system).

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Reuse
From the 1960s to the 1990s, most new software was developed from
scratch, by writing all code in a high-level programming language.
◦ The only significant reuse or software was the reuse of functions and objects
in programming language libraries.

Costs and schedule pressure mean that this approach became

increasingly unviable, especially for commercial and Internet-based
systems.
An approach to development based around the reuse of existing
software emerged and is now generally used for business and scientific
software.

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Reuse levels
The abstraction level
◦ At this level, you don’t reuse software directly but use knowledge of
successful abstractions in the design of your software.

The object level

◦ At this level, you directly reuse objects from a library rather than writing the
code yourself.

The component level

◦ Components are collections of objects and object classes that you reuse in
application systems.

The system level

◦ At this level, you reuse entire application systems.

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Software reuse

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Reuse costs
The costs of the time spent in looking for software to reuse and
assessing whether or not it meets your needs.
Where applicable, the costs of buying the reusable software. For large
off-the-shelf systems, these costs can be very high.
The costs of adapting and configuring the reusable software
components or systems to reflect the requirements of the system that
you are developing.
The costs of integrating reusable software elements with each other (if
you are using software from different sources) and with the new code
that you have developed.

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Configuration management
Configuration management is the name given to the general process of
managing a changing software system.
The aim of configuration management is to support the system
integration process so that all developers can access the project code
and documents in a controlled way, find out what changes have been
made, and compile and link components to create a system.

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Configuration management
activities
Version management, where support is provided to keep track of
the different versions of software components. Version
management systems include facilities to coordinate
development by several programmers.
System integration, where support is provided to help developers
define what versions of components are used to create each
version of a system. This description is then used to build a
system automatically by compiling and linking the required
components.
Problem tracking, where support is provided to allow users to
report bugs and other problems, and to allow all developers to
see who is working on these problems and when they are fixed.

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Configuration management
tool interaction

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Host-target development
Most software is developed on one computer (the host), but runs on a
separate machine (the target).
More generally, we can talk about a development platform and an
execution platform.
◦ A platform is more than just hardware.
◦ It includes the installed operating system plus other supporting software
such as a database management system or, for development platforms, an
interactive development environment.

Development platform usually has different installed software than

execution platform; these platforms may have different architectures.

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Host-target development

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Development platform tools
An integrated compiler and syntax-directed editing system that allows
you to create, edit and compile code.
A language debugging system.
Graphical editing tools, such as tools to edit UML models.
Testing tools, such as Junit that can automatically run a set of tests on a
new version of a program.
Project support tools that help you organize the code for different
development projects.

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Integrated development
environments (IDEs)
Software development tools are often grouped to create an integrated
development environment (IDE).
An IDE is a set of software tools that supports different aspects of
software development, within some common framework and user
interface.
IDEs are created to support development in a specific programming
language such as Java. The language IDE may be developed specially, or
may be an instantiation of a general-purpose IDE, with specific
language-support tools.

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 Component/system
deployment factors
If a component is designed for a specific hardware architecture, or relies on
some other software system, it must obviously be deployed on a platform that
provides the required hardware and software support.
High availability systems may require components to be deployed on more
than one platform. This means that, in the event of platform failure, an
alternative implementation of the component is available.
If there is a high level of communications traffic between components, it
usually makes sense to deploy them on the same platform or on platforms
that are physically close to one other. This reduces the delay between the time
a message is sent by one component and received by another.

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 Open source development

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Open source development
Open source development is an approach to software development in
which the source code of a software system is published and volunteers
are invited to participate in the development process
Its roots are in the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org), which
advocates that source code should not be proprietary but rather should
always be available for users to examine and modify as they wish.
Open source software extended this idea by using the Internet to
recruit a much larger population of volunteer developers. Many of them
are also users of the code.

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Open source systems
The best-known open source product is, of course, the Linux operating
system which is widely used as a server system and, increasingly, as a
desktop environment.
Other important open source products are Java, the Apache web server
and the mySQL database management system.

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Open source issues
Should the product that is being developed make use of open source
components?
Should an open source approach be used for the software’s
development?

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Open source business
More and more product companies are using an open source approach
to development.
Their business model is not reliant on selling a software product but on
selling support for that product.
They believe that involving the open source community will allow
software to be developed more cheaply, more quickly and will create a
community of users for the software.

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Open source licensing
A fundamental principle of open-source development is that source
code should be freely available, this does not mean that anyone can do
as they wish with that code.
◦ Legally, the developer of the code (either a company or an individual) still
owns the code. They can place restrictions on how it is used by including
legally binding conditions in an open source software license.
◦ Some open source developers believe that if an open source component is
used to develop a new system, then that system should also be open source.
◦ Others are willing to allow their code to be used without this restriction. The
developed systems may be proprietary and sold as closed source systems.

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License models
The GNU General Public License (GPL). This is a so-called
‘reciprocal’ license that means that if you use open source
software that is licensed under the GPL license, then you must
make that software open source.
The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a variant of the
GPL license where you can write components that link to open
source code without having to publish the source of these
components.
The Berkley Standard Distribution (BSD) License. This is a
non-reciprocal license, which means you are not obliged to
re-publish any changes or modifications made to open source
code. You can include the code in proprietary systems that are
sold.

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License management
Establish a system for maintaining information about open-source
components that are downloaded and used.
Be aware of the different types of licenses and understand how a
component is licensed before it is used.
Be aware of evolution pathways for components.
Educate people about open source.
Have auditing systems in place.
Participate in the open source community.

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