TOOLS USA '96

Effective Use of Object Databases

Nimish Doshi, Versant Object Technology, USA

This tutorial presents a brief history and comparison of past database technologies with current object database technologies. It will go over what is an object database, some terminology, and the features that are available today and what is needed for the future. An example will be given on how the object paradigm is used to solve an object database application problem. Finally, a brief discussion about the ODMG (Object Database Management Group) standards will be presented. The tutorial assumes that the attendees have basic knowledge of OO and database concepts and have had some prior programming experience.

NIMISH DOSHI is systems engineer at Versant Object Technology. He previously worked at Bellcore as a software engineer in provisioning systems and computer security, and his research there lead to past TOOLS papers covering object oriented scripting for database access and objects used as communication agents for database access.

Application of Design Patterns in Commercial Domains

Wolfgang Pree, University of Linz, Austria

The tutorial gives an overview of state-of-the-art design patterns approaches, focusing on those that support the development of frameworks. "Hot Spot" cards will be introduced. Case studies illustrate how to apply hot spot cards together with design patterns in commercial application domains including bank-specific systems, reservation systems and point-of-sale systems in retail trade stores.

WOLFGANG PREEis an Associate Professor at the University of Linz. He has consulted and taught object-oriented software design and development for numerous companies in Europe and the U.S. Dr Wolfgang Pree's work focuses on the development of domain-specific frameworks. He is the author of Design Patterns for Object-Oriented Software Development (Addison- Wesley, 1995).

Testing Object-Oriented Software

Donald Firesmith

This tutorial presents the basic issues involving object- oriented testing including encapsulation, inheritance, message passing, common bugs in object-oriented software, the object- oriented development cycle, and OOPL differences regarding testing. This tutorial also presents PLOOT, the Pattern Language for Object-Oriented Testing, which includes 27 patterns covering class/cluster testing, testing techniques, test case form and location, test infrastructure, acceptance testing, and the testing process.

DONALD FIRESMITH is author of Object-Oriented Requirements Analysis: A Software Engineering Approach (1993) and Testing Object-Oriented Software (4th quarter 1996), coauthor of The Dictionary of Object Technology (1995), editor of two anthologies on OO testing (1996-1997), and is a senior technical staff member at Knowledge Systems Corporation.

Meilir Page-Jones, Wayland Systems, USA

Some specific topics that will be explored in the tutorial are: Coupling and cohesion: are they still relevant?; What interdependencies (connascence) should we look out for in OOD?; The class as a state-space: Subclasses and their invariants; Principles of contravariance and covariance; Principle of closed behavior; Class interfaces: the good, the bad and the ugly; Uses and abuses of inheritance; Demands imposed by reusability.

MEILIR PAGE-JONES is president and senior consulting methodologist at Wayland Systems Inc. in Bellevue, WA. He is author of three books: The Practical Guide to Structured Systems Design, Practical Project Management, and What Every Programmer Should Know about Object-Oriented Design.