Unit 12 reflection

I think the second assignment was especially helpful in making me try to think about the issues that were arising (in terms of what to do), and how I would get around those issues – and there were certainly many drawbacks that I had to go through while doing it! Even though I undoubtedly felt some stress and frustration, I am glad that I had experienced this, as it gave me the resilience to find the solution, and perhaps think about certain things in an alternate way.

Further reading:

In terms of the concept known as “design patterns”, despite its wide use among developers, researchers such as Zhang and Budgen (2012) argue that there is not enough empirical evidence to suggest “when to use (or not to use) particular patterns”. Nonetheless, they argue that it is important to be conscious of its limitations. One limitation is outlined by Gamma et al. (1995) whereby unlike frameworks which can be implemented and reused directly in programming languages, design patterns in their book have to be implemented before they are used each time. On the other hand, design patterns are able to be used in almost any type of application, whereas frameworks have a particular application domain.

References

Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R. & Vlissides, J. (1995). Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley.

Zhang, C. & Budgen, D. (2012). ‘What Do We Know about the Effectiveness of Software Design Patterns?’ in: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 38(5): 1213-1231. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2011.79.