Software Engineering Stack Exchange
Software Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [modeling]

Creating and manipulating abstract representations of a problem or of software elements for the purpose of facilitating the understanding, reasoning, and solving of the problem.

Modeling consist of gathering and structuring knowledge to create and manipulate abstract representations ("models") of a problem or of software elements.

The purpose of models is to facilitate the understanding of a problem or a domain, reasoning about it, designing solutions, and guide the implementation of solutions.

Modeling often uses a standardized set of techniques and representations. Typical examples are:

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Should a developer do UI mockups if there are no designers in the project?

I'm working with a small team that creates a proprietary web application and UX isn't much of a priority since our own people will be the ones operating it, but we do try to make their jobs easier. Should I, as a developer, create a UI mockup…
PentaKon
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When is primitive obsession not a code smell?

I have read plenty of articles recently that describe primitive obsession as a code smell. There are two benefits of avoiding primitive obsession: It makes the domain model more explicit. For example, I can talk to a business analyst about a Post…
w0051977
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What are functional programmers using in place of UML?

I'm CS student. I am currently attending lectures, where we're taught Objective Analysis and Design. It consists mostly of writing use cases, analysing the problem that we can face when writing some application for the client, and how to design the…
MatthewRock
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Is there a programming paradigm that promotes making dependencies extremely obvious to other programmers?

I work in a Data Warehouse that sources multiple systems via many streams and layers with maze-like dependencies linking various artifacts. Pretty much every day I run into situations like this: I run something, it doesn't work, I go through loads…
Christs_Chin
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Patterns for propagating changes up an object model..?

Here's a common scenario that's always frustrating for me to deal with. I have an object model with a parent object. The parent contains some child objects. Something like this. public class Zoo { public List Animals { get; set; } …
ConditionRacer
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How do I manage shared models among many microservices?

My question is similar to this one, but a bit more specific to one case. Let's say I have a payments model, and this is used by my reporting service, as well as my accounting service. Is it inescapable that these two services are now coupled by…
George Grainger
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How important are UML diagrams for a successful project?

I'm in the middle of a project and I was asked to write UML diagrams (use cases,class diagram,etc). The project isn't very complex. I was wondering if this be a waste of my time? Should I just be doing other fun stuff like writing code? And when is…
Wissem
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Should the internal naming (classes, methods, database tables, etc) of entities be changed if the marketing and UI naming changes?

We've had a long living product for about 8 years now. Over time, the names of concepts and entities change. Should we put the work in to rename all the code base and database tables and columns to match these new names? Is there a study made on…
Mark
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What are the benefits of modeling software systems vs. doing it all in code?

Most, if not all IT people I know believe that it is beneficial to model software with UML or other types of diagrams before coding. (My question is not about UML specifically, it could be any graphical or textual description of the software…
Frank Puffer
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How do I represent nested actions in a UML activity diagram?

This question is very similar to this one, but the answer doesn't match my needs. It's focused on a specific UML tool (Papyrus) whereas my question is more general about UML. I would like to represent a nested action in an activity diagram, but I…
Tim
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Did the need for software design specification significantly decrease with the evolution of more expressive programming languages?

For many IT people, including myself a few years ago, the ideal software development process would involve the creation of detailed design documents with lots of UML diagrams before a line of code gets written. (This looks like a description of the…
Frank Puffer
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FP for simulation and modelling

I'm about to start a simulation/modelling project. I already know that OOP is used for this kind of projects. However, studying Haskell made me consider using the FP paradigm for modelling a system of components. Let me elaborate: Let's say I have a…
heaptobesquare
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What is this domain of study?

Suppose I have a situation where I'm designing a website for a shoe reseller. They have different brands and kinds of shoes and of course, they want a really good search function. So there are different properties that shoes can have. They can have…
user1936
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How do professional software development teams deal with design complexity in non-trivial projects?

First, I realize this question may by somewhat long and vague and I apologize for this. This is probably a basic problem with a short name to anybody who's "got it", but as I find myself lacking in this regard, please bear with me in describing the…
neuviemeporte
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How to model the dependencies between fields in very complex forms

We have to create a web application that will be used as an application form for multiple insurance products (15 in total). This application form will be similar to a form wizard, it will span across multiple pages, depending on what product between…
Marius Burz
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