Series: Living OO Design
Lecture: Introduction to UML for Developers and OO Best Practices

A few questions addressed in the lecture

Monday 8 March

10:00 10:55

Lecture
1

Tim Muenchen
Bergische Universität Wuppertal - Germany

Introduction to the series of two lectures
In High Energy Physics, as in most areas of Science, using Computers to simulate, analyse and interpret physical data has become indispensable in the last decades, as the sheer amount of data one has to process has grown to dimensions difficult to handle manually. On top of that, the usage of object orientation is on the advance, replacing legacy programming languages like Fortran by modern ones like (among others) C++, Java and Python.

Though, one can not just carry programming style and concepts from procedural languages to object oriented languages and hope to benefit from the advantages of this new programming paradigm. Instead, there are numerous things to keep in mind to produce working, error-free and performing - but also understandable, maintainable and expandable - object oriented software designs.

This series of two lectures aims to sensitize the "object oriented programming physicist" to things he or she should be aware of and keep in mind to fully utilize the OO-paradigm.

First lecture:
Introduction to UML for Developers and OO Best Practices

In this lecture, a powerful tool to express, communicate and record software design concepts, ideas and structures is briefly presented: the Universal Modeling Language.

Albeit being a complex and complete language to describe most aspects of (not only) software design, we will focus on the single most useful part of the UML when talking about OO best practices and patterns: the Class Diagram. This is then used in all of the rest of the series to visualize the concepts presented.

The main part of the lecture, then, focuses on ten best practices every OO-developer should know. The best practices and the reasons for them being crucial are described and deepened by examples and anecdotes.

Audience and benefits
This series of two lectures targets physicists designing and implementing  physics analysis code, event generators and the like in object-oriented languages like C++, as well as more junior developers of software infrastructure libraries used at CERN.

On top of that, every interested programmer can benefit from the concepts presented in these lectures.

In this first lecture, attendees will be sensitized to things to know and keep in  mind when designing software systems to ensure the best possible quality of  systems in terms of maintainability, flexibility and extensibility, comprehensibility and stability.

You will learn about a few simple rules to adhere that will help in make your design better in respect to those criteria, and what to avoid in designing software.

Before that, the UML class diagram is introduced briefly as means to communicate design concepts and to visualize the Best Practices presented in this lecture, and the Design Patterns in lecture 2.

Pre-requisite
Attendees should have basic knowledge about object-oriented programming, concepts and idioms, as well as object-oriented programming languages like C++ and Java."