Martins Design Study

Overview

My design study is about the reporting interface for my group (Team Patchwork's) Eclipse plugin which we designed last year. I wrote the reporting interface myself, but without using good OO design. Although it worked, it is a little bothersome to extend (I.E. to create new types of reports or new views an layouts. Hence, I decided to analyze and improve it somewhat.

Use Cases

The reporting interface would be used as follows:

• The user should be able to generate a report for any date range.
• The user should be able to generate a report for any metric defined by the plugin.
• The user should be able to edit an existing report, by changing the date range. The report display should update to reflect the new date range.
• The user should be able to add or remove metrics from an existing report. The report display should update to reflect the new date range.
• The user should be able to save a report as some sort of file (XML, CSV, anything will do, really).

Initial Design

A diagram of the initial design of the reporting interface is shown below.

TODO.

Flaws

The flaws in the initial design include the following:

Improved Design

A diagram of the improved design of the reporting interface is shown below.

TODO.

Patterns Used

In the improved version, I used the following design patterns:

TODO.

Discussion

The design project was to improve the reporting interface for the "Team Patchwork Reporting Application". TODO.