Purpose of This Certification

The purpose of this certification is to see whether you can do a full object-oriented analysis and design cycle. The assignment has many subtle aspects that are easy to overlook, including gathering requirements accurately from the instructions, making a decision about extending versus modifying, and implementing design patterns correctly.

Do you understand object-oriented development? This certification assignment forces programmers to step up from coder to object-oriented analysis and design, which should be done with Unified Modeling Language (UML) if possible (although Sun doesn't require using UML). This book uses UML to describe software components . I hope you are in the practice of doing the same because UML has become the lingua franca of software design artifacts. UML enables you to draw a picture of an application that everyone can understand. For example, it's easier to see a design pattern in your project if you depict it with UML before writing the code. You don't need special software; just paper will do for this assignment. Of course, creating UML diagrams is easier if you have Visio or the market-best MagicDraw UML.

The assignment requires applying a few, perhaps three to six, design patterns, those "best practice" superheroes of reusability. These patterns dictate the best way to define your objects and their relationships. Patterns are more than just another requirement; their proper use facilitates your overall development effort. So I'm advocating a pattern-based, OOP project using UML as a sure-fire way to get a great score. This same advice is good for development in general.