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Structured Programming

This document discusses the principles and benefits of structured programming. It outlines seven key concepts: 1) structured walkthroughs with customers, 2) stepwise refinement to break problems into smaller pieces, 3) modular design with self-contained blocks, 4) bottom-up coding to test individual functions, 5) using stubs to test unfinished modules, 6) white box and black box testing, and 7) structured programming documents to manage changes. Adopting these practices helps produce programs that meet requirements with fewer bugs, and makes the code easier to maintain.

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emingliu1
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8 views

Structured Programming

This document discusses the principles and benefits of structured programming. It outlines seven key concepts: 1) structured walkthroughs with customers, 2) stepwise refinement to break problems into smaller pieces, 3) modular design with self-contained blocks, 4) bottom-up coding to test individual functions, 5) using stubs to test unfinished modules, 6) white box and black box testing, and 7) structured programming documents to manage changes. Adopting these practices helps produce programs that meet requirements with fewer bugs, and makes the code easier to maintain.

Uploaded by

emingliu1
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Structured Programming

Shiu Yin YUEN

A VERY important Philosophy for Writing Programs

This is supposed to be a refresher only. You are


expected to hone your skills by writing programs and
reading books on structured programming if you have
not mastered structured programming

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Bad Programming Habits

 Foggy idea about what is to be done


 Write program with no planning; Start from the
beginning and write to the end
 No systematic debugging; Considered it finished if it
works on one example

 Undesirable Results !
 Do not know how to program
 Programs with numerous bugs that take extremely long
time to debug, or even failure to complete
 Any change of requirement invites rewriting of the entire
program again

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Benefits of Structured Programming

 Programs that meet the needs of the


customer
 Though initially take longer time to generate
code, often result in code with runs with no
bugs the first time it’s run
 Easy to handle change in program
specifications in the future

3
Structured Programming

 A tool that becomes popular since the 70’s


 Should have been learnt by student that have
taken any programming course
 Absolutely essential for handling large
programs that involve a team of programmers
and huge number of man hours.
 The other popular philosophy is “object
oriented programming”, but many
programmers prefers structured programming
4
Seven Important Concepts of Structured
Programming: 1. Structured Walkthrough
 Before writing any program, the programming team
must sit down with the customer and find out the
requirement
 Extremely important
 Customer’s requirement is often imprecise
 Iterative: several rounds of talks
 Must result in a specifications that is
 very precise
 Understandable by programmer in programming terms

5
2. Stepwise Refinement
 A “DIVIDE and CONQUER” strategy
 When given a large job, divide it into smaller jobs.
 Given any job, it is useful to divide it into
 Input
 Process
 Output
 Draw a tree
 Refine each job level by level (Breadth first)
 Use pseudo code to describe each job
 Decision on data structure is delayed as much as
possible

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Extremely
Complex
Job

Input Process Output Level 1

… …
Input from
user Initialize Level 2

…
Initialize security Level 3
settings

7
3. Modular Design

 Each ellipse is a module


 A module is a self contained block:
 It only receives inputs from its immediate ancestor
 It only outputs to its immediate ancestor
 Its computation should only require calling functions that
are its immediate children and them only
 The input variables and output variables of each
module should be specified when defining the
module
 Each module must be “programmable” – no majic
block should exist

8
4. Bottom Up Coding

 When the refinement has reached a simple


function, code the simple function
 You can test the simple function
independently of the rest of the program
 This gives you achievement and satisfaction,
sustaining you through the long project
 Project Manager exercises division of labour
here, ask a member to be responsible solely
for that function
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5. Testing Using Stubs

 A structured Programming project can be


field tested before everything finishes
 Stubs - for unfinished modules, use a human
being to emulate it, act on the test inputs, she
fits in the correct output data by hand
 then other programmers can test their work
 Meanwhile she continues to program her own
module (according to Project timelines)

10
6. White Box and Black Box Testing

 For each module and whole program

 White Box
 Input something for which you know the desired
result, it should give your expected output
 Black Box
 Treat it as a black box, input some data, is the
result reasonable?

11
7. Structured Programming Documents

 A structured programming document is


generated along with the program
 When requirement of customer changes, go
to the document
 Does not need to rewrite the whole program,
just find which modules need to rewrite and
rewrite the module and the sub-tree under it
 Programmer usually forgets their code in 2
months; the structured document helps her to
refresh her work quickly
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Advice

 YOU MUST TRY IT TO LEARN IT

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References

 General Philosophy
 Numerous books about Structured Programming in the
library
 A very good structured programming example
 W. Findlay and D.A. Watt, Pascal: An Introduction to
Methodical Programming 1987, Ch. 7 illustrates how to use
stepwise refinement to program a complicated task. Try it
YOURSELF once, then you would get it

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