Software Engineering Practices Many well-known software engineering practices are difficult to accurately define and many individuals have different ideas about what elements each should encompass as well as the relative worth of each. In fact, most of these practices overlap with others. Each has utility in many important environments and it is worthwhile to give a brief description of each. For these, applications it is important to define classes of data objects. Most data elements can be defined as classes.
Objects are instances of a class.
For example, a college database contains a class called Students . Each individual student is an instance of this class. The Students class is defined by its attributes . The particular attributes that define a class are application dependent. In the database example given above we are likely to want to periodically Add students to the database Delete students from the database and Change information associated with students.