An overview of object-oriented design and C++

The object-oriented software development methodology is rapidly replacing the structure-oriented development methodology. The object-oriented software design stage of the software development cycle, informally, consists of partitioning of the problem into a set of communicating entities called objects. Each object is an instance of a framework called a class. Each class defines a structure consisting of a collection of data and a set of functions (called methods) permitted to operate on the class data. The object-oriented language C++ (based on the highly popular "C" language) has become the de-facto standard for the object-oriented software programming. In this paper we present an overview of the object-oriented design and object-oriented programming stages of the software development cycle. We briefly discuss the object-oriented software development cycle to provide the context for the design and programming stages. We discuss the design and implementation of a class, and the development of a software project utilizing the object-oriented principles.<>