Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

Chapter 13. Conceptual Design

This chapter presents a high-level overview and conceptual design for the case study associated with this book, Within-a-Click. I've already touched on some of the basic aspects and functionality in previous chapters. The case study is an end-to-end membership sub-system that should allow users to perform the following basic operations:

• Create a new account by specifying typical account information, such as username, password, e-mail address, and other security-related information.

• Activate their account by specifying a system-generated account Activation Key, which will have been e-mailed to them after they created their new account.

• Log in and log out of the website.

• Update their account details, change their password, and close their account.

Although there are many third-party products and framework components to help you implement some or all of this functionality (for example, the ASP.NET Membership system), this book concentrates on designing a custom solution.

This chapter first takes a holistic view of the overall functionality, and then defines some fundamental guiding principles, requirements, and constraints. Chapter 14 looks at planning the architecture and Chapter 15 looks at modeling the application components according to the conceptual architecture. The patterns and practices discussed in Chapters 16 through 24 then use the case study's conceptual design as the basis for further discussion.

This book is not intended to teach you how ...