Object-oriented (OO) programming has a growing number of converts. Many people believe that object orientation will put a dent in the software crisis. There is a glimmer of hope that OO software development will become more like engineering. Objects, whatever they are now, may become for software what nuts, bolts and beams are for construction design, what 2-by-4s and 2-by-6s are for home construction, and what chips are for computer hardware construction.
This book is intended to help the reader better understand the role of analysis and design in the object-oriented software development process. Experiments to use structured analysis and design as precursors to an object-oriented implementation have failed. The descriptions produced by the structured methods partition reality along the wrong dimensions. Classes are not recognized and inheritance as an abstraction mechanism is not exploited. However, we are fortunate that a multitude of object-oriented analysis and design methods have emerged and are still under development. Core OO notions have found their home place in the analysis phase. Abstraction and specialization via inheritance, originally advertised as key ingredients of OO programming, have been abstracted into key ingredients of OO analysis (OOA). Analysis-level property inheritance maps smoothly on the behavior inheritance of the programming realm.
A common selling point of the OO paradigm is that it is more "natural" to traverse from analysis to implementation. For example, as described by de Champeaux and Anderson, developers at Hewlett-Packard who were well versed in the structured paradigm reported that the "conceptual distances" between the phases of their project were smaller using OO methods. Classes identified in the analysis phase carried over into the implementation. They observed as well that the defect density in their C++ code was only 50% of that of their C code.
About the Author
Dennis de Champeaux is an independent consultant assisting software development organizations in making the shift to object-oriented methods. He was previously software project manager and scientist at HP Labs.
Doug Lea is one of the foremost experts on object-oriented technology and software reuse. He has been doing collaborative research with Sun Labs for more than five years. Lea is Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Oswego, Co-director of the Software Engineering Lab at the New York Center for Advanced Technology in Computer Applications, and Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Syracuse University. In addition, he co-authored the book,
Object-Oriented System Development (Addison-Wesley, 1993). He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire.
Penelope Faure is president of Faure, Inc., a software engineering consulting firm.
