GRASP_Patterns.ppt

GRASP Patterns Best Practices for Object-Oriented Software Design GRASP Patterns GRASP: Generalized Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns GRASP patterns are really more accurately described as best practices GRASP patterns outline best practices which can be employed in any object-oriented design These best practices, if used properly, will lead to maintainable, reusable, understandable, and easy to develop software GRASP Patterns GRASP patterns describe how to assign responsibilities to classes Warning: Grasps tend to be vague Responsibilities is “a contract or obligation of a classifier” (UML definition) Responsibilities can include behaviour, data storage, object creation and more They often fall into two categories: Doing Knowing 1. Information Expert Assign a responsibility (such as behaviour) to the information expert An information expert is the class that has (or has direct access to) the information necessary to fulfill the responsibility e.g. A responsibility such as handling a deposit (i.e. increase balance) should be assigned to the Account class This is because Account contains the account balance as one of its attributes 1. Information Expert This GRASP has the effect of having a class with high cohesion Cohesion – the degree to which the information and responsibilities of a class are related to each other Cohesion is improved since the information needed for a responsibility is closely related to the responsibility itself 2. Creator Give a class A the responsibility of creating instances of another class, B, if: A is an aggregate of B A is a container of B If no classes apply, then assign the responsibility to a class C if: C records instances of B C closely uses B objects C has the initializing data for B 2. Creator Whenever one class has the responsibility of creating instances of another class, the two classes are coupled Coupling itself is not wrong, but we want to eliminate certain types of coupling Coupling of classes is a measure of ho