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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T00:49:37+00:00

[Objective-C] Do you still use Styrofoam balls to model your systems, where each ball

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[Objective-C]

Do you still use Styrofoam balls to model your systems, where each ball
represents a class?

Tom Love: We do, actually. We’ve also done a 3D animation version of
it, which we found to be nowhere near
as useful as the Styrofoam balls.
There’s something about a physical,
conspicuous structure hanging from the
ceiling right in the middle of a
development project that’s regularly
updated to provide not only the
structure of the system that you’re
building, but also the current status
of each one of the classes.

We’ve done it on 19 projects the last time I’ve counted. One of them was 1,856 classes, which is big – actually, probably bigger than it should be. It was a big commercial project, so it needed to be somewhat big.

Masterminds of Programming

It is the first time I’ve read or heard about using styrofoam balls to model classes.
Is that a commonly used technique? And, how does that sort of modeling help us to design better the system?

If you have any photos to share which can show us how the classes are represented it’d be great!

Update: So, it seems that the material most people use is the paper. Styrofoam balls are actually oddballs, not a commonly used technique.

Noticeable techniques:

Thank you all for the very good answers.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I found a couple of styrofoam models for:

    Windows 95

    and

    Lotus Notes

    (if that helps)

    Actually, here’s a Tom Love case study that shows a couple of his models.

    This model may represent the least
    expensive CASE tool on the market —
    materials cost $20.35. It was more
    useful than any CASE tools I have ever
    used.

    We used it in three important ways.

    1. It fixed the number of classes that we would deliver in the finished
      application and we did not allow new
      ones to be added, unless existing ones
      could be removed.

    2. It was a very useful way to publicly document which classes had
      been code reviewed (blue ribbons) and
      tested (green ribbons).

    3. It helped everyone understand what was being built and how much time and
      effort it takes to do testing,
      documentation and code reviews.

    Edit: photo of object model

    alt text http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/82/stryrofoamobjectmodel.jpg

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