Survey reusability through Object Orient Design

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Survey reusability through Object Orient Design
Survey reusability through Object Oriented Design
Sunday, 22 November 2009
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Agenda

• MR and IT separated at birth?
• Presentation of OOD concepts
• Example of an OOD survey system BMRBs PTK
• OOD a future for Market Research?

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Introduction

Statistics and IT close relatives?

• Same father Blaise Pascal (1623-1692)
• 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

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Introduction

Evolution

• Machine code and assembly
• Structured languages (1971)
• GUI languages (1991)
• Object oriented environment (2001)

• Card column punch
• Quantime, Bellview(mid 70s)
• In2itive, Askia (mid 90s)

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The concepts design

• The design stage is not an option, its 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

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Object Oriented 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

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Object Oriented Design

• Objects have
• Behaviours (they do things) referred as methods
• Properties or states (they have things) referred
  as attributes

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Methods

• 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

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Attributes

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

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3 founding paradigms

• Encapsulation
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism

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Paradigm 1 encapsulation

• An object is a black-box. You do not need to see
  whats 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

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Paradigm 2 inheritance

• 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

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Paradigm 3 polymorphism

• Generally, the ability to appear in many forms
• Here the ability to process objects differently
  depending on their class

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

• Very large survey (23 000 responses, 30 000
  interviews)
• Questionnaire scanned (hence data needs to be
  cleaned)
• Large printed volumes produced
• Need a custom tool

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Background (prior to 1998)

• The edit script used CCP (PTTs Star software
  sta spec)
• 10 000 lines of script
• The reporting used PTTs 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

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The TGI questionnaire

• Very repetitive subjects (baked beans, sausage
  rolls, soap,)
• Edited in the same manner
• Reported in the same manner

A case for OOD
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Templates

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Subjects

• Easy to define
• Easy to maintain
• Concurrent access

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Subjects

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The edit language

• CCP free
• Brand / response independent
• Overridable

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Testing the edits

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The reports

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The report language

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Conclusion

• PTK is still ahead of its time
• But reusability was its raison detre
• What about commercial packages?

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Object Oriented Survey?

• Improve the library concept
• AskML interoperability made possible
• Conjoint analysis on all packages?
• Metaquestions in Dimensions

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Thanks

• Steve Harris
• Kevin Wavell
• Mark Pietronave
• Steve Taylor

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