Chapter 7 – Design and Implementation

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Topics covered

 understand the most important activities in a general,

object-oriented design process;
 understand some of the different models that may be
used to document an object-oriented design;
 know about the idea of design patterns and how these
are a way of reusing design knowledge and experience;
 have been introduced to key issues that have to be
considered when implementing software, including
software reuse.

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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

 An object-oriented system is made up of interacting

objects that maintain their own local state and provide
operations on that state.
 Object-oriented design processes involve designing
object classes and the relationships between these
classes
 Objects include both data and operations to manipulate
that data. They may therefore be understood and
modified as stand-alone entities. Changing the
implementation of an object or adding services should
not affect other system objects.

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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

 To develop a system design from concept to detailed,

object-oriented design:

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 part of
embedded software for a wilderness weather station.
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System context and interactions

System context models and interaction models

present complementary views of the relationships
between a system and its environment:
 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 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 models

 The context model of a system may be represented

using associations

 Associations simply show that there are some

relationships between the entities involved in the
association.

 You can document the environment of the system using

a simple block diagram, showing the entities in the
system and their association

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System context for the weather station

Wilderness weather stations are deployed in remote areas.

Each weather station records local weather information and periodically transfers
this to a weather information system, using a satellite link.
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Weather station use cases

TASKS
Report weather–send weather data to
the weather information system
Report status–send status information
to the weather information system

Restart–if the weather station is shut

down, restart the system
Shutdown–shut down the weather
station
Reconfigure–reconfigure the weather
station software
Powersave–put the weather station into
power-saving mode
Remote control–send control
commands to any weather station
subsystem
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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 (Layered Arc.) that communicate by
broadcasting messages on a common infrastructure.

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 High-level architecture of the weather station

Each subsystem listens for messages on that infrastructure and picks up the
messages that are intended for them.
This “listener model” is a commonly used architectural style for distributed
systems.

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 High-level architecture of the weather station

The key benefit of this architecture is that it is easy to support different

configurations of
subsystems because the sender of a message does not need to address the
message to a particular subsystem.
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Architecture of data collection system

The Transmitter and Receiver objects are concerned with

managing communications
WeatherData object encapsulates the information that is collected
from the instruments and transmitted to the weather information
system.
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Object class identification

 You should have some ideas about the essential objects

in the system that you are [Link] refine these
ideas about the system objects.
 Use case description helps to identify objects and
operations in the system.
 From the description of the Report weather use case, it
is obvious that you will need to implement objects
representing the instruments that collect weather data
and an object representing the ‐­ summary of the weather
data

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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. (Objects and attributes
are nouns; operations or services are verbs)
 Base the identification on tangible things in the
application domain.(such as aircraft, roles such as manager,
events such as request, locations)
 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 (identified from the system

description and the scenario (use case) 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

The WeatherStation object class

provides the basic interface of the
weather station with its environment
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Weather station object classes

sends the summarized data from the weather

station instruments to the weather information
system.
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Weather station object classes

directly related to instruments in the system.

bjects operate autonomously collect data at
the specified frequency and store the collected
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data [Link] 7 Design and Implementation 25
Design models

 Design models show the objects and object classes and

relationships between these entities.
 These models are the bridge between the system
requirements and the implementation of a system.
 They also have to include enough detail for
programmers to make implementation decisions.
 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

 Three UML model types are particularly useful for

adding detail to use case and architectural models:
 Subsystem models (Structured) that show logical
groupings of objects into coherent subsystems. (class
diagram )
 Sequence models (Dynamic) that show the sequence
of object interactions.
 State machine models (Dynamic) that show how
individual objects change their state in response to
events.

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Subsystem models

 Shows how the design is organised into logically

related groups of objects.
 In the UML, these are shown using packages - an
encapsulation construct. This is a logical model. The
actual organisation of objects in the system may be
different.

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Sequence models

 Sequence models show the sequence of object

interactions that take place
 Objects are arranged horizontally across the top;
 Time is represented vertically so models are read top to bottom;
 Interactions are represented by labelled arrows, Different styles
of arrow represent different types of interaction;
 A thin rectangle in an object lifeline represents the time when the
object is the controlling object in the system.

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Sequence diagram describing data collection

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Sequence diagram describing data collection

The SatComms object receives a request

from the weather information system to
collect a weather report from a weather
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Sequence diagram describing data collection

SatComms sends a message to

WeatherStation, via a satellite link, to create a
summary of the collected weather data.
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Sequence diagram describing data collection

WeatherStation sends a message to a

Commslink object to summarize the weather
data.
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Sequence diagram describing data collection

Commslink calls the summarize method in the object WeatherData and

waits for a reply.
The weather data summary is computed and returned to
WeatherStation via the Commslink object.
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Sequence diagram describing data collection

WeatherStation then calls the SatComms object to transmit the summarized data to
the weather information system, through the satellite communications system.

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State diagrams

 State diagrams are used to show how objects respond to

different service requests and the state transitions
triggered by these requests.
 State diagrams are useful high-level models of a system
or an object’s run-time behavior.
 You don’t usually need a state diagram for all of the
objects in the system.
 Many of the objects in a system are relatively simple and
a state model adds unnecessary detail to the design.

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Weather station state diagram

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Interface specification

 An important part of any design process is the

specification of the interfaces between the components
in the design.
 You need to specify interfaces so that objects and
subsystems can be designed in parallel.

 You should not include details of the data representation

in an interface design, as attributes are not defined in an
interface specification

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Interface specification

 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

defines the operation

names that are used to generate weather and
status reports
4 operations mapped to remoteControl()

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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.
 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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Design patterns

 Patterns are a way of reusing the knowledge and

experience of other designers.
 Design patterns are usually associated with object-
oriented design.
 You could have configuration patterns for instantiating
reusable application systems.

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Pattern elements

 Name
 A meaningful pattern identifier.
 Problem description (when the pattern may be applied).
 Solution description.
 Not a concrete design but a template for a design solution that
can be instantiated in different ways. (mostly graphically)
 Consequences
 The results and trade-offs of applying the pattern.

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 Implementation issues

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Implementation issues

 A criticial stage is system implementation, where you

create an executable version of the software.
 Implementation may involve developing programs in
high- or low-level programming languages or tailoring
and adapting generic, off-the-shelf systems to meet the
specific requirements of an organization.

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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.(JavaMail library. )
 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

 Software development, change happens all the time, so change

management is absolutely essential.
 When several people are involved in developing a software system,
you have to make sure that team members don’t interfere with each
other’s work.
 That is, if two people are working on a component, their changes
have to be coordinated. Otherwise, one programmer may make
changes and overwrite the other’s work.
 You also have to ensure that everyone can access the most up-to-
date versions of software components; otherwise developers may
redo work that has already been done.

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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.

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Configuration management activities

 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.
 Release management, where new versions of a software
system are released to customers. Release management is
concerned with planning the functionality of new releases and
organizing the software for distribution.

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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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Host-target development

 Sometimes, the development platform and execution

platform are the same, making it possible to develop the
software and test it on the same machine.
 Therefore, if you develop in Java, the target environment
is the Java Virtual Machine.
 In principle, this is the same on every computer, so
programs should be portable from one machine to
another.
 However, particularly for embedded systems and
mobile systems, the development and the execution
platforms are different.
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Host-target development

 You need to either move your developed software to the

execution platform for testing or run a simulator on your
development machine.
 Simulators are often used when developing embedded
systems. You simulate hardware devices, such as
sensors, and the events in the environment in which the
system will be deployed.
 Simulators speed up the development
 However, simulators are expensive to develop and so
are usually available only for the most popular hardware
architectures.
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Host-target development

 You need to either move your developed software to the

execution platform for testing or run a simulator on your
development machine.
 Simulators are often used when developing embedded
systems. You simulate hardware devices, such as
sensors, and the events in the environment in which the
system will be deployed.
 Simulators speed up the development
 However, simulators are expensive to develop and so
are usually available only for the most popular hardware
architectures.
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Development platform tools

 Software development tools are now usually installed

within 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.
 Generally, IDEs are created to support development in a
specific programming language such as Java.
 A general-purpose IDE is a framework for hosting
software tools general-purpose IDE is the Eclipse
environment

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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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