suc高级软件工程课件2rational_design_process.pptVIP

Dong SHAO, Nanjing University A rational design process: How and why to fake it By David L. Parnas THE SEARCH FOR THE PHILOSOPHERS STONE: WHY DO WE WANT A RATIONAL DESIGN PROCESS? A perfectly rational person is one who always has a good reason for what he does. Each step taken can be shown to be the best way to get to a well defined goal. However, to many observers, the usual process of designing software appears quite irrational. Programmers start without a clear statement of desired behavior and implementation constraints. They make a long sequence of design decisions with no clear statement of why they do things the way they do. Their rationale is rarely explained. Many of us are not satisfied with such a design process. That is why there is research in software design, programming methods, structured programming and related topics. Ideally, we would like to derive our programs from a statement of requirements in the same sense that theorems are derived from axioms in a published proof. All of the methodologies that can be considered “top down” are the result of our desire to have a rational, systematic way of designing software. bad news and good news The bad news is that, in our opinion, we will never find the philosophers stone. We will never find a process that allows us to design software in a perfectly rational way. The good news is that we can fake it. We can present our system to others as if we had been rational designers and it pays to pretend do so during development and maintenance. WHY WILL A SOFTWARE DESIGN “PROCESS” ALWAYS BE AN IDEALISATION? We will never see a software project that proceeds in the “rational” way. Some of the reasons are listed below: (1) In most cases the people who commission the building of a software system do not know exactly what they want and are unable to tell us all that they know. (2) Even if we knew the requirements, there are many other facts that we need to know to design the software. Many of the details only beco