Matthew's Design Study

For my design study, I am going to be working to improve the design of my COSC460 project. The project is a plug-in for Eclipse designed to provide a tool for visualising software metrics directly onto source code. The plug-in is written in Java and is approximately 5K LOC.

Existing Code Base

This system is my first attempt at developing this system.

Initial development. Please note some of the composition/dependency connections are wrong.

Initial development with functional groupings.

Design Discussion/Overview

In this section I will briefly discuss each of the current components and their roles. Please note that these functional groupings do not directly correspond to existing packages.

• Plugin:
• Document Monitor:
• Editor Listeners:
• The Model:
• Display & Editor Manipulation:
• API:
• Serialisation:
• Eclipse View:

Areas of Greatest Concern

• API: Is the architectural model appropriate? Is the use of the Observer pattern correct here?
• Model: Are there any possible improvements?
• String Manipulation: Is there any way to avoid the current String manipulation in Mapping Properties?
• Display Strategies: Is there any way of simplifying this hierarchy? Are the current methods of instantiation appropriate?