Professional Java User Interfaces

Chapter 5. Iterative GUI Development with Java

No design is ever perfected at the first attempt. Instead, a professional design in many engineering fields is the result of several refinement cycles. This is true for software engineering in general, and is even more true for GUI development, where the presence of end users makes the engineering task highly unpredictable and dependant on subjective criteria. In this chapter we will examine the major approaches and the available techniques for building professional Java GUIs through iterative cycles of refinement.

The iterative GUI development approach consists of frequent product releases that continuously and smoothly expand the application by means of small additive changes, implementation refinements (such as refactorings) and continuous, pervasive testing. Testing 'in the large' is essential for achieving an effective iterative development. We will discuss GUI testing, usability testing and memory profiling, an often overlooked aspect of GUI development.

Readers are not forced to adopt an iterative development approach if they don't want to. Despite being a powerful development approach – see the discussion in Chapter 1 – it is labor-intensive, involves mastering many techniques, and ultimately leads to good and cost-effective results only when developers genuinely embrace its philosophy. Nevertheless, the techniques discussed in this chapter can be applied to a wide range of software engineering approaches, ranging from XP (Extreme ...