Often, there is benefit, but it's quickly swamped by the maintenance effort.
In the group I'm working with now, we're transitioning to all interactions with the user being abstracted into an AppModel domain object, which will describe user interaction in an abstract, non GUI or other interface-specific way. We will be implementing meta-level and meta-syntax-driven automated coding standards to detect probably violations. In addition, our (now incomplete) Unit Test suite will be run against a Code Coverage tool against the change requests. So any new change requests will have to have coverage in a Unit Test, which will be detected by a nightly script. (The above tools are based on the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser parser & libraries.)
One benefit -- we will be able to test everything in Unit Tests and leave out GUI specifics!
Another benefit of the AppModel architecture, we can eventually publish our abstracted applications as Web Services, and get out of the business of maintaining nitty-gritty GUI code. This will make that group 10X more valuable to their corporation, and they will eventually be doing only half the work!
Comments
Often, there is benefit, but it's quickly swamped by the maintenance effort.
In the group I'm working with now, we're transitioning to all interactions with the user being abstracted into an AppModel domain object, which will describe user interaction in an abstract, non GUI or other interface-specific way. We will be implementing meta-level and meta-syntax-driven automated coding standards to detect probably violations. In addition, our (now incomplete) Unit Test suite will be run against a Code Coverage tool against the change requests. So any new change requests will have to have coverage in a Unit Test, which will be detected by a nightly script. (The above tools are based on the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser parser & libraries.)
One benefit -- we will be able to test everything in Unit Tests and leave out GUI specifics!
Another benefit of the AppModel architecture, we can eventually publish our abstracted applications as Web Services, and get out of the business of maintaining nitty-gritty GUI code. This will make that group 10X more valuable to their corporation, and they will eventually be doing only half the work!