Object Behavior Specification: Software Blueprints

It may be difficult to imagine yourself simultaneously playing the roles of designer, implementor, tester, and user of a software tool. But that’s what best describes your activities if you are writing a program for your own later use. When you graduate, you might participate in a software development team where it is now common that designer, implementor, tester, and other roles are assumed by specialists on the team. For now, let’s stick with the case where you are the designer, implementer, tester and user of a software tool. Some form of abstract specification of the software is needed to facilitate communication among designer, implementor, and user. We will call it a blueprint (playing the same role as design sketches used by building architects) as illustrated in Figure 1. Suppose you are developing a set of classes in C++ or some other object-oriented language.