Software Design and Architecture Specialization

This course takes Java beginners to the next level by covering object-oriented analysis and design. You will discover how to create modular, flexible, and reusable software, by applying object-oriented design principles and guidelines. And, you will be able to communicate these designs in a visual notation known as Unified Modelling Language (UML).

You will be challenged in the Capstone Project to apply your knowledge of object-oriented design by evolving and documenting the Java codebase for an Android application with corresponding UML documentation. After completing this course, you will be able to: • Apply the Class Responsibility Collaborator (CRC) technique to analyze and design the object-oriented model for a problem. • Explain and apply object-oriented modeling principles and their purpose (e.g., abstraction, encapsulation, decomposition, generalization). • Explain and apply different types of inheritance • Explain the difference between association, aggregation, and composition dependencies. • Express object-oriented models as Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams. • Translate between UML class diagrams and equivalent Java code. • Apply design guidelines for modularity, separation of concerns, information hiding, and conceptual integrity to create a flexible, reusable, maintainable design. • Explain the tradeoff between cohesion and coupling.

This course extends object-oriented analysis and design by incorporating design patterns to create interactive applications. Through a survey of established design patterns, you will gain a foundation for more complex software applications. Finally, you will identify problematic software designs by referencing a catalog of code smells.

You will be challenged in the Capstone Project to redesign an existing Java-based Android application to implement a combination of design patterns. You will also critique a given Java codebase for code smells. After completing this course, you will be able to: • Demonstrate how to use design patterns to address user interface design issues. • Identify the most suitable design pattern to address a given application design problem. • Apply design principles (e.g., open-closed, dependency inversion, least knowledge). • Critique code by identifying and refactoring anti-patterns. • Apply the model-view-controller architectural pattern.

The way that software components — subroutines, classes, functions, etc. — are arranged, and the interactions between them, is called architecture. In this course you will study the ways these architectures are represented, both in UML and other visual tools. We will introduce the most common architectures, their qualities, and tradeoffs. We will talk about how architectures are evaluated, what makes a good architecture, and an architecture can be improved. We'll also talk about how the architecture touches on the process of software development.

In the Capstone Project you will document a Java-based Android application with UML diagrams and analyze evaluate the application’s architecture using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). After completing this course, you will be able to: • Compare and contrast the components, connections, protocols, topologies, constraints, tradeoffs, and variations of different types of architectural styles used in the design of applications and systems (e.g., main program and subroutine, object-oriented, interpreters, pipes and filters, database centric, event-based). • Describe the properties of layered and n-tier architectures. • Create UML ipackage, component, and deployment diagrams to express the architectural structure of a system. • Explain the behaviour of a system using UML activity diagrams. • Document a multi-application system with a layered architecture.