A Design Method for Object-Oriented Programming

Object-oriented programming has come forth as an important programming paradigm in the 1980’s. As more and more people practise object-oriented programming, the subject of how to design and develop a system towards an object-oriented implementation becomes important. There is, therefore, a general demand for a design method which is specially developed for object-oriented programming. The theme of this thesis is to develop such a design method. The thesis starts off with a comprehensive background on object-oriented programming and how it differs from tradi­ tional programming. It also gives a detailed analysis of why existing design methods are inadequate for object-oriented programming. The thesis then presents the design method which has been developed in this research. The different stages of the design method and the various tasks that have to be performed at each stage are discussed thoroughly. The design method also embeds a design description language which allows system designers to communicate with each other during the design phase and this is also talked about in the thesis. Inheritance is regarded as an important feature found in object-oriented programming. A design method without substantial support for inheritance is considered to be incomplete. Therefore, a mechansim which is called the inheritance factorisation process is developed to assist system designers to construct class hierarchies in object-oriented programming. The mechanism has a formal model which ensures its correctness. The details of the formal model and the issues concerning how to use the mechanism forms a crucial part of this thesis. To examine the performance of the inheritance factorisation process, a factorisation engine is implemented and experiments have been carried out. To illustrate how the design method is used in system designs, two case studies have been carried out and are presented in this thesis. The result of this thesis is a design method which guides system designers to organise the design activities towards an object-oriented implementation. It also forms the basis of future work which will lead to a computer-aided software engineering environment for object-oriented programming.

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