Java Reference
In-Depth Information
You will also see the requirements for a simple budget application that will
be used in succeeding chapters. It has little to do with real budgets, but lots to
do with a simple application that we can use to demonstrate various Java
technologies.
11.2
S
TATEMENT OF THE
N
EED
Financial planning is something that everyone does. The basic tool of financial
planning is the budget. But unlike the home budget, the budget of a large cor-
poration is managed at multiple levels within the organization. Sure, at some
level, the board, the CEO, and the CFO decide that “we will spend X million
dollars for operations for this quarter,” but that is the start of the process, not
the end.
From there, the feeding frenzy of middle management begins. And keeping
track of things becomes an important aspect of financial control and corporate
governance.
Realistically, any large business will already have processes and tools in
place that meet this need. We are not expecting that what we develop here will
be anything that a business will actually adopt to manage this process. Rather,
our goal is to illustrate some methods of software development that actually
work to build real Java application. The outline of methods and code could be
used to address many classes of enterprise software.
11.3
H
OW TO
D
EVELOP
S
OFTWARE
There is a science of Software Engineering. The development of software can
be made an engineering discipline, with mathematical rules and metrics of
success. Every aspect of a complete system can be worked out in detail before-
hand so that you know, well before a line of code is written, what the outcome
will be.
That's not what we're talking about here.
We are talking about software development not as it happens at NASA,
medical device companies, and in factories where nuclear missiles are made. In
those contexts, the potential costs of error are extremely high, ranging from the
multibillion dollar loss (and public embarrassment) of crashing a spacecraft into
Mars, on through having heart pacemakers fire off incorrectly, right to ending
life as we know it on this planet. In such cases, no matter how much the correct
