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Showing posts from December, 2012

Examples and Objects

The most successful and fun project I have been part of developed a network simulator for operator training. We had a great team and freedom to work how we wanted, but another key to success was the domain model. The analyst drew object diagrams to explain to the programmers and testers how a network topology could be, for instance like this: This may look simple, but these diagrams explained a lot to us. We used them to discuss what should happen in different scenarios, such as what should happen when a Trunk is connected to another Port. Then we implemented these scenarios as unit tests. This resulted in a robust implementation with few bugs. But in most projects, we don't have anything like this. In one project I spent several days trying to understand how a trading system worked. I had the domain model and database schema, but it was not clear when these objects were created, updated and deleted in the database. I read thousands of lines of code and run the program