Wirfs-Brock Associates Introduction to Object Design and UML

Ideal size is up to 12 students. More can be accommodated. Price: Contact us at training@wirfs-brock dot come. Course customizations welcome and encouraged. Price includes all course materials. Instructor travel and lodging expenses are extra.

This revised and expanded version of our course teaches practical techniques for defining objects, their roles, responsibilities and interactions and using the Unified Modeling Language to document the design. Responsibility-Driven uses powerful, informal design techniques to promote thinking and abstracting the essential characteristics of complex problems. We model the dynamics of our object collaborations with UML sequence diagrams. We use class diagrams to describe a model of key classes, their structural and inheritance relationships, interfaces and attributes.

This course is intended for developers that want a systematic approach to designing an object application. It is also useful to managers and analysts that need to understand an object-oriented design process.

Objectives

Our goal in this design course is to equip you with sufficient skills to enable you to design a medium-sized project. You should be able to evaluate design alternatives and make trade-offs with confidence.

Topics

Day 1: Object Design and Modeling Overview
The first day is exploratory and introduces many new concepts. Short exercises reinforce key concepts.

Object fundamentals: objects, messages, inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, abstract and concrete classes
Principles and Concepts of Responsibility-Driven Design: roles, responsibilities, object role stereotypes, collaborations
Describing the system with the Unified Modeling Language (UML): class diagrams, object diagrams, sequence diagrams, activity diagrams, state diagrams, use case diagrams
Describing system usage: use cases and use case forms: narratives, scenarios, conversations
Using design patterns to describe customizable solutions to generalized design problems

Day 2: Finding Objects and Modeling Responsibilities and Collaborations
Students focus on inventing an initial candidate model of objects, assigning them some responsibilities, and demonstrating how they collaborate to satisfy a use case.

Identifying domain objects: value and entity objects
Guidelines for naming objects
Assigning stereotypes and defining candidates’ purpose
Writing design stories and identifying themes
Finding candidates that support themes
Modeling with Candidate-Responsibility-Collaboration cards
Finding and assigning responsibilities
Deriving responsibilities from use cases
Developing a collaboration model to support a use case
Sketching initial collaboration ideas

Day 3: Collaborations and Control Centers
Here students think more critically about their designs. We focus on developing consistent patterns of interaction between collaborators and designing to recover from exceptional conditions.

Finding responsibilities from system descriptions and stereotypes
Role stereotypes and typical patterns of collaborations
Establishing visibility among collaborators
Encapsulating decision-making and delegation
Separating coordination and state
Control center design
Delegated, centralized, and dispersed control styles
Distributing control: Using the State Pattern
Recovering from exceptions

Day 4: Specifying flexibility
Students refine their designs and identify points where design variability is required. They then develop design solutions that support planned variations and document their results.

Using inheritance and composition
Factoring for flexibility: Techniques from simple to complex
Identifying hot spots and writing design recipes
Designing configurable algorithms
Using structural design patterns
Realizing roles in classes and interfaces
Preserving your design in code

Course Philosophy
Students learn by doing. There is ample class-time opportunity to explore the design techniques and develop design skills. Class is roughly half lecture/demonstration, and half exercises and in-depth labs. Each learning cycle, which lasts between a half hour and two hours, consists of:

First, a lecture and demonstration of new concepts and techniques
Then, a challenging team-oriented design exercise
Finally, solutions are discussed and critiqued in a group clinic.

Students present their work for review and comment. An instructor-led discussion of student work reinforces good design practices and explores acceptable alternatives solutions. Short in-class readings provoke stimulating discussions on the nature of software design, the value of inheritance and reuse, how to evaluate different design alternatives, and where and when design precision is needed.

Prerequisites
Attendees should have a background in at least one programming language.

Materials
We round out your professional library with references vital to on-the-job performance: These books provide guidance on object design and continued development.

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