This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
1.2 The Most Important Learning Goal?
There are many possible activities and artifacts in introductory OOA/D, and a wealth of principles and guidelines. Suppose we must choose a single practical skill from all the topics discussed here—a "desert island" skill. What would it be?
A critical ability in OO development is to skillfully assign responsibilities to software objects.
Why? Because it is one activity that must be performed—either while drawing a UML diagram or programming—and it strongly influences the robustness, maintainability, and reusability of software components.
Of course, there are other important skills in OOA/D, but responsibility assignment is emphasized in this introduction because it tends to be a challenging skill to master (with many "degrees of freedom" or alternatives), and yet is vitally important. On a real project, a developer might not have the opportunity to perform any other modeling activities—the "rush to code" development process. Yet even in this situation, assigning responsibilities is inevitable.
Consequently, the design steps in this book emphasize principles of responsibility assignment.
Nine fundamental principles in object design and responsibility assignment are presented and applied. They are organized in a learning aid called GRASP of principles with names such as Information Expert and Creator.