A Catalogue of Object-Oriented Design Heuristics

Abstract

Object-oriented design is a process of identifying relevant objects, factoring them into classes, organizing hierarchically, and establishing dynamic collaborations among the objects. It is a difficult process especially for novice designers. In order to guide the novices, software engineers used some hints, guidelines and tips to communicate design experience from the expert. Design heuristic is common design problems that developers encounter during software development. This knowledge from the experienced designers is used to guide the novices. Design heuristic is an encapsulation of the design problem and its solution. Several works related to heuristics for object-oriented design have been presented in the past few years. Each of the study has categorized the heuristics in different ways. The purpose of this paper is to document design heuristics of object-oriented approach from literature study. This is part of work to produce a guidance system reusing the design knowledge from the experienced designers. The objectives are to show that the design experience can be transferred from the expert to the novice in an effective manner and to guide the novice in designing an object-oriented system. The documented design heuristics which is called, a catalogue of design heuristic, will be incorporated in the system to guide the novice designers. This paper first looks at design heuristics by previous researchers. Then the catalogue for object-oriented design heuristics is presented followed by discussion on the catalogue. The paper ends with a conclusion section. The heuristics are categorized into four components; class, class collaboration, class relationship and class encapsulation heuristics. These components are the process of designing software