[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!