An NAFP Project: Use of Object Oriented Methodologies and Design Patterns to Refactor Software Design

In the early problem-solution era of software programming, functional decompositions were mainly used to design and implement software solutions. In functional decompositions, functions and data are introduced as two separate entities during the design phase, and are followed as such in the implementation phase. Functional decompositions make use of refactoring through optimizing the algorithms, grouping similar functionalities into common reusable functions, and using abstract representations of data where possible; all these are done during the implementation phase. This paper advocates the usage of object-oriented methodologies and design patterns as the centerpieces of refactoring software solutions. Refactoring software is a method of changing software design while explicitly preserving its external functionalities. The combined usage of object-oriented methodologies and design patterns to refactor should also benefit the overall software life cycle cost with improved software.