IV: Determining Business and Technology Requirements
Object-oriented programming and design
The basic concept in this approach is that of an "object" which is a data structure (abstract data type) encapsulated with a set of routines, called "methods," that operate on the data. Operations on the data can only be performed via these methods, which are common to all objects that are instances of a particular "class." Thus the interface to objects is well defined, and allows the code implementing the methods to be changed so long as the interface remains the same. Object-oriented design is one of the stages of object-oriented programming. It is a method in which a system is modeled as a collection of cooperating objects, and individual objects are treated as instances of a class within a class hierarchy.
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