2 replies to this topic

[Blaine]

Hello there,

So lately I have been writing larger and larger applications/programs and have run into may times when I have had to recode due to insufficient planning. So I was curious what techniques more experienced programmers used to plan their projects. Do you just plan what you want your program to do and how it looks or do you make a basic layout of what classes will be involved and what they do? Also, how do you represent this?

Thank you,
Blaine

[josep]

You must plan the functionality of the system. How you expect it to perform, how you are going to store your data, Objects which are going to interact etc, The look an feel also comes into play. make sure you unit test the system and test after every iteration to ensure that you can notice bugs and major problems at an early stage.

[WingedPanther]

One of the realities of programming is that, no matter how well you plan, you will find that you missed something. This is why refactoring is such a big issue in the programming industry. The key is to write your code in a way that will make it easier for you to change it as needed.

There are a lot of tools for planning your program. Various UML diagrams and flowcharts, for example, can help you plan out how classes will communicate with each other, how the system will respond to user input, how processing will work, etc. With all that said, there will be changes you have to make to your program.