Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD)

Soon you’ll be writing programs in C++. How will you create the code (i.e., the program instructions) for your programs? Perhaps, like many programmers, you’ll simply turn on your computer and start typing. This approach may work for small programs (like the ones we present in the early chapters of the book), but what if you were asked to create a software system to control thousands of automated teller machines for a major bank? Or suppose you were asked to work on a team of thousands of software developers building the next U.S. air traffic control system? For projects so large and complex, you should not simply sit down and start writing programs.

To create the best solutions, you should follow a detailed analysis process for determining your project’s requirements (i.e., defining what the system is supposed to do) and developing a design that satisfies them (i.e., deciding how the system should do it). Ideally, you’d go through this process and carefully review the design (and have your design reviewed by other software professionals) before writing any code. If this process involves analyzing and designing your system from an object-oriented point of view, it’s called an object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) process. Languages like C++ are object oriented. Programming in such a language, called object-oriented programming (OOP), allows you to implement an object-oriented design as a working system.