Efficient management of object-oriented software development

Object-oriented software development has become popular in recent years because it encourages the use of modern software engineering technology and promotes and facilitates software reuse. It also provides a consistent and natural decomposition of the problem domain, and a structured knowledge representation that enhances software extension, modification and maintenance. In this paper, the key concepts that describe object-oriented software development are data abstraction, information hiding, encapsulation and inheritance. In an object-oriented software development environment using C++, the basic unit is the class which is the realization of data abstraction and information hiding. When the number of classes increases to a certain amount in a multi-user distributed software development environment, there is an urgent need for the central management of classes in a class library system. Current techniques for managing large class libraries make use of browsers. However, these tend to impose severe limitations when the size of the libraries reaches the order of thousands. This paper presents a method for the efficient management of object-oriented development using a relational data dictionary approach.<>