Decomposing a Problem

Start with a plan! The more time you spend planning, the less time you will spend debugging!

Procedural Design

• Divide and Conquer-divide a large problem into smaller problems that can be solved independently (also called top-down design and step-wise refinement)
• Flow-charts (helpful in identifying loops)
• Pseudo-code (writing out steps in English)

• Identify data and the operations to be performed on that data
• "Clouds"
• Advanced tools: Rational Rose (Modeling tool) and UML-Unified Modeling Language

• Generalize the problem-think about it abstractly. This way your resulting product will be "reusable" code.
• Think carefully about the input and output. Use "storyboards" to aid in the design of more complex interfaces.

• Comment as you go--you will find your own bugs this way!
• Repetitive code is usually a sign of weak design. Don't "break" out of loops. Don't use global variables. "Hiding" information will help to prevent, or at least isolate, bugs.
• Test each component separately. Comment out code and print the values of variables to help you isolate bugs.