A Philosophy of Software Design


Book Description




Software Design Decoded


Book Description

An engaging, illustrated collection of insights revealing the practices and principles that expert software designers use to create great software. What makes an expert software designer? It is more than experience or innate ability. Expert software designers have specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles that they apply deliberately during their design work. This book offers sixty-six insights, distilled from years of studying experts at work, that capture what successful software designers actually do to create great software. The book presents these insights in a series of two-page illustrated spreads, with the principle and a short explanatory text on one page, and a drawing on the facing page. For example, “Experts generate alternatives” is illustrated by the same few balloons turned into a set of very different balloon animals. The text is engaging and accessible; the drawings are thought-provoking and often playful. Organized into such categories as “Experts reflect,” “Experts are not afraid,” and “Experts break the rules,” the insights range from “Experts prefer simple solutions” to “Experts see error as opportunity.” Readers learn that “Experts involve the user”; “Experts take inspiration from wherever they can”; “Experts design throughout the creation of software”; and “Experts draw the problem as much as they draw the solution.” One habit for an aspiring expert software designer to develop would be to read and reread this entertaining but essential little book. The insights described offer a guide for the novice or a reference for the veteran—in software design or any design profession. A companion web site provides an annotated bibliography that compiles key underpinning literature, the opportunity to suggest additional insights, and more.




Software Design for Flexibility


Book Description

Strategies for building large systems that can be easily adapted for new situations with only minor programming modifications. Time pressures encourage programmers to write code that works well for a narrow purpose, with no room to grow. But the best systems are evolvable; they can be adapted for new situations by adding code, rather than changing the existing code. The authors describe techniques they have found effective--over their combined 100-plus years of programming experience--that will help programmers avoid programming themselves into corners. The authors explore ways to enhance flexibility by: Organizing systems using combinators to compose mix-and-match parts, ranging from small functions to whole arithmetics, with standardized interfaces Augmenting data with independent annotation layers, such as units of measurement or provenance Combining independent pieces of partial information using unification or propagation Separating control structure from problem domain with domain models, rule systems and pattern matching, propagation, and dependency-directed backtracking Extending the programming language, using dynamically extensible evaluators




Python for Software Design


Book Description

Python for Software Design is a concise introduction to software design using the Python programming language. The focus is on the programming process, with special emphasis on debugging. The book includes a wide range of exercises, from short examples to substantial projects, so that students have ample opportunity to practice each new concept.




Software Design by Example


Book Description

The best way to learn design in any field is to study examples, and some of the best examples of software design come from the tools programmers use in their own work. Software Design by Example: A Tool-Based Introduction with JavaScript therefore builds small versions of the things programmers use in order to demystify them and give some insights into how experienced programmers think. From a file backup system and a testing framework to a regular expression matcher, a browser layout engine, and a very small compiler, we explore common design patterns, show how making code easier to test also makes it easier to reuse, and help readers understand how debuggers, profilers, package managers, and version control systems work so that they can use them more effectively. This material can be used for self-paced study, in an undergraduate course on software design, or as the core of an intensive weeklong workshop for working programmers. Each chapter has a set of exercises ranging in size and difficulty from half a dozen lines to a full day’s work. Readers should be familiar with the basics of modern JavaScript, but the more advanced features of the language are explained and illustrated as they are introduced. All the written material in this project can be freely reused under the terms of the Creative Commons - Attribution license, while all of the software is made available under the terms of the Hippocratic License. All proceeds from sale of this book will go to support the Red Door Family Shelter in Toronto. Features • Teaches software design by showing programmers how to build the tools they use every day • Each chapter includes exercises to help readers check and deepen their understanding • All the example code can be downloaded, re-used, and modified under an open license




Practical Object-Oriented Design


Book Description

The Complete Guide to Writing Maintainable, Manageable, Pleasing, and Powerful Object-Oriented Applications Object-oriented programming languages exist to help you create beautiful, straightforward applications that are easy to change and simple to extend. Unfortunately, the world is awash with object-oriented (OO) applications that are difficult to understand and expensive to change. Practical Object-Oriented Design, Second Edition, immerses you in an OO mindset and teaches you powerful, real-world, object-oriented design techniques with simple and practical examples. Sandi Metz demonstrates how to build new applications that can “survive success” and repair existing applications that have become impossible to change. Each technique is illustrated with extended examples in the easy-to-understand Ruby programming language, all downloadable from the companion website, poodr.com. Fully updated for Ruby 2.5, this guide shows how to Decide what belongs in a single class Avoid entangling objects that should be kept separate Define flexible interfaces among objects Reduce programming overhead costs with duck typing Successfully apply inheritance Build objects via composition Whatever your previous object-oriented experience, this concise guide will help you achieve the superior outcomes you’re looking for. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.




Code Simplicity


Book Description

Good software design is simple and easy to understand. Unfortunately, the average computer program today is so complex that no one could possibly comprehend how all the code works. This concise guide helps you understand the fundamentals of good design through scientific laws—principles you can apply to any programming language or project from here to eternity. Whether you’re a junior programmer, senior software engineer, or non-technical manager, you’ll learn how to create a sound plan for your software project, and make better decisions about the pattern and structure of your system. Discover why good software design has become the missing science Understand the ultimate purpose of software and the goals of good design Determine the value of your design now and in the future Examine real-world examples that demonstrate how a system changes over time Create designs that allow for the most change in the environment with the least change in the software Make easier changes in the future by keeping your code simpler now Gain better knowledge of your software’s behavior with more accurate tests




Specification by Example


Book Description

Summary Specification by Example is an emerging practice for creating software based on realistic examples, bridging the communication gap between business stakeholders and the dev teams building the software. In this book, author Gojko Adzic distills interviews with successful teams worldwide, sharing how they specify, develop, and deliver software, without defects, in short iterative delivery cycles. About the Technology Specification by Example is a collaborative method for specifying requirements and tests. Seven patterns, fully explored in this book, are key to making the method effective. The method has four main benefits: it produces living, reliable documentation; it defines expectations clearly and makes validation efficient; it reduces rework; and, above all, it assures delivery teams and business stakeholders that the software that's built is right for its purpose. About the Book This book distills from the experience of leading teams worldwide effective ways to specify, test, and deliver software in short, iterative delivery cycles. Case studies in this book range from small web startups to large financial institutions, working in many processes including XP, Scrum, and Kanban. This book is written for developers, testers, analysts, and business people working together to build great software. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Common process patterns How to avoid bad practices Fitting SBE in your process 50+ case studies =============================================== Table of Contents Part 1 Getting started Part 2 Key process patterns Part 3 Case studies Key benefits Key process patterns Living documentation Initiating the changes Deriving scope from goals Specifying collaboratively Illustrating using examples Refining the specification Automating validation without changing specifications Validating frequently Evolving a documentation system uSwitch RainStor Iowa Student Loan Sabre Airline Solutions ePlan Services Songkick Concluding thoughts




Software Design X-Rays


Book Description

Are you working on a codebase where cost overruns, death marches, and heroic fights with legacy code monsters are the norm? Battle these adversaries with novel ways to identify and prioritize technical debt, based on behavioral data from how developers work with code. And that's just for starters. Because good code involves social design, as well as technical design, you can find surprising dependencies between people and code to resolve coordination bottlenecks among teams. Best of all, the techniques build on behavioral data that you already have: your version-control system. Join the fight for better code! Use statistics and data science to uncover both problematic code and the behavioral patterns of the developers who build your software. This combination gives you insights you can't get from the code alone. Use these insights to prioritize refactoring needs, measure their effect, find implicit dependencies between different modules, and automatically create knowledge maps of your system based on actual code contributions. In a radical, much-needed change from common practice, guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Discover a comprehensive set of practical analysis techniques based on version-control data, where each point is illustrated with a case study from a real-world codebase. Because the techniques are language neutral, you can apply them to your own code no matter what programming language you use. Guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Apply research findings from social psychology to software development, ensuring you get the tools you need to coach your organization towards better code. If you're an experienced programmer, software architect, or technical manager, you'll get a new perspective that will change how you work with code. What You Need: You don't have to install anything to follow along in the book. TThe case studies in the book use well-known open source projects hosted on GitHub. You'll use CodeScene, a free software analysis tool for open source projects, for the case studies. We also discuss alternative tooling options where they exist.




Scientific Software Design


Book Description

The authors analyze how the structure of a package determines its developmental complexity according to such measures as bug search times and documentation information content. The work presents arguments for why these issues impact solution cost and time more than does scalable performance. The final chapter explores the question of scalable execution and shows how scalable design relates to scalable execution. The book's focus is on program organization, which has received considerable attention in the broader software engineering community, where graphical description standards for modeling software structure and behavior have been developed by computer scientists. These discussions might be enriched by engineers who write scientific codes. This book aims to bring such scientific programmers into discussion with computer scientists. The authors do so by introducing object-oriented software design patterns in the context of scientific simulation.