Chapter 7 – Implementation

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 1

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 2

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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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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 5

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.
 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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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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 7

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.
 Development platform usually has different installed
software than execution platform; these platforms may
have different architectures.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 8

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.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 9

Integrated development environments (IDEs)

 Software development tools are often grouped to create

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.
 IDEs are created to support development in a specific
programming language such as Java. The language IDE
may be developed specially, or may be an instantiation
of a general-purpose IDE, with specific language-support
tools.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 10

Open source development

 Open source development is an approach to software

development in which the source code of a software
system is published and volunteers are invited to
participate in the development process
 Its roots are in the Free Software Foundation
(www.fsf.org), which advocates that source code should
not be proprietary but rather should always be available
for users to examine and modify as they wish.
 Open source software extended this idea by using the
Internet to recruit a much larger population of volunteer
developers. Many of them are also users of the code.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 11

Open source systems

 The best-known open source product is, of course, the

Linux operating system which is widely used as a server
system and, increasingly, as a desktop environment.
 Other important open source products are Java, the
Apache web server and the mySQL database
management system.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 12

Open source issues

 Should the product that is being developed make use of

open source components?
 Should an open source approach be used for the
software’s development?

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Open source business

 More and more product companies are using an open

source approach to development.
 Their business model is not reliant on selling a software
product but on selling support for that product.
 They believe that involving the open source community
will allow software to be developed more cheaply, more
quickly and will create a community of users for the
software.

Chapter 7 Design and implementation 14

Key points

 Software design and implementation are inter-leaved activities. When

developing software, you should always consider the possibility of reusing
existing software, either as components, services or complete systems.
 Configuration management is the process of managing changes to an
evolving software system. It is essential when a team of people are
cooperating to develop software.
 Most software development is host-target development. You use an IDE on
a host machine to develop the software, which is transferred to a target
machine for execution.
 Open-source development involves making the source code of a system
publicly available. This means that many people can propose changes and
improvements to the software.

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