Real Web Project Management: Case Studies and Best Practices from the Trenches

Object-Oriented Design

Object-oriented (OO) design is a way of thinking about software that organizes everything into objects. An object is a software model of some real-world entity, like a customer or an invoice. Objects are organized into classes, collections of objects that share common attributes and behaviors. Objects can inherit characteristics from their parent classes. In order to design an OO system, your team must take an inventory of the objects that the system will contain and identify the behaviors and responsibilities of those objects, as well as how the objects will interact with each other.

To understand objects, classes, and inheritance, we can use the simple example of a dog named Roark. If we were to think about Roark in object-oriented ...