Survey reusability through Object Orient Design Survey reusability through Object Oriented Design Friday, 01 May 2015

MR and IT: separated at birth? Presentation of OOD concepts Example of an OOD survey system: BMRB ’ s PTK OOD: a future for Market Research? Agenda

Introduction Same father: Blaise Pascal ( ) –Inventor of the first mechanical adding machine (1642) –Formulated the mathematical theory of probability (1654) They have unachievable goals –Bug free software –Reliable and actionable information Dusty image… slowly improving Statistics and IT: close relatives?

Introduction Machine code and assembly Structured languages (1971) GUI languages (1991) Object oriented environment (2001) Evolution Card column punch Quantime, Bellview(mid 70s) In2itive, Askia (mid 90s) …

The design stage is not an option, it’s a must Design is about managing complexity: a design method helps you to split big projects into manageable chunks that you will be able to comprehend separately In object-oriented design, complexity is managed using abstraction “Abstraction is the elimination of the irrelevant and the amplification of the essential” Robert Martin The concepts… design

OOD is an attempt at unifying the world into hierarchical concepts Cars, cycles and trains are vehicles Motorcycles and bicycles are cycles My Peugeot is an implementation of the “vehicle” class An object is sometimes the class or the implementation A vehicle is a virtual class Object Oriented Design

Objects have: Behaviours (they do things) referred as methods Properties or states (they have things) referred as attributes Object Oriented Design

Vehicles have a Start and a Stop method …. A uniform way to start and to stop among all implementations Some sub-classes of vehicles may have methods specific to them Methods

Vehicles usually have a maximum speed Land vehicles have a number of wheels Attributes

Encapsulation Inheritance Polymorphism 3 founding paradigms

An object is a black-box. You do not need to see what’s inside to use it Encapsulation also means that an object includes everything it needs: both the data and the operations on it (methods) The encapsulation concept is very powerful because it allows an efficient division of labour in large projects Paradigm 1: encapsulation

Reusability is another flagship of OOD The complex job is done once and for all in a parent class. And it is tested once! Deriving and Overriding Paradigm 2: inheritance

Generally, the ability to appear in many forms Here the ability to process objects differently depending on their class Paradigm 3: polymorphism

Survey reusability through Object Orient Design A real life example BMRB, the TGI and the PTK

Very large survey ( responses, interviews) Questionnaire scanned (hence data needs to be cleaned) Large printed volumes produced Need a custom tool Background

The edit script used CCP (PTT ’ s Star software – sta spec) – lines of script The reporting used PTT ’ s Startab- stb spec The weighting used QSL Pressure was on to deliver a multi language / multi country system able to deliver on a quarterly base Background (prior to 1998)

Very repetitive subjects (baked beans, sausage rolls, soap,…) Edited in the same manner Reported in the same manner The TGI questionnaire A case for OOD…

Templates

Subjects Easy to define Easy to maintain Concurrent access

Subjects

The edit language CCP free Brand / response independent Overridable

Testing the edits

The reports

The report language

Conclusion PTK is still ahead of its time But reusability was its raison d’etre What about commercial packages?

Object Oriented Survey? Improve the library concept AskML : interoperability made possible –Conjoint analysis on all packages? Metaquestions in Dimensions

Thanks Steve Harris Kevin Wavell Mark Pietronave Steve Taylor