Software Design and

Implementation

1
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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 2

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 3

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 4

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 5

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.
• 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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 6

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).

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 7

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 8

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 9

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 10

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 11

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 12

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 13

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 14

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 15

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 16

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 17

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?

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 18

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 19

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 20

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 21

Key points
• Software design and implementation are inter-leaved activities. The level
of detail in the design depends on the type of system and whether you are
using a plan-driven or agile approach.
• The process of object-oriented design includes activities to design the
system architecture, identify objects in the system, describe the design
using different object models and document the component interfaces.
• A range of different models may be produced during an object-oriented
design process. These include static models (class models, generalization
models, association models) and dynamic models (sequence models,
state machine models).
• Component interfaces must be defined precisely so that other objects can
use them. A UML interface stereotype may be used to define interfaces.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 22

Key points
• When developing software, you should always consider the possibility of
reusing existing software, either as components, services or complete
systems.
• Configuration management is the process of managing changes to an
evolving software system. It is essential when a team of people are
cooperating to develop software.
• Most software development is host-target development. You use an IDE
on a host machine to develop the software, which is transferred to a
target machine for execution.
• Open source development involves making the source code of a system
publicly available. This means that many people can propose changes
and improvements to the software.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 23

End

24