Summary: Designing Stack Overflow

Now that you’ve completed the Stack Overflow case study, let’s take a moment to reflect on and consolidate what we’ve learned. We’ll revisit the key system requirements, identify the core classes along with their responsibilities and relationships, and highlight the major design principles applied. We’ll also examine how objects interact within the system and walk through the overall workflow to understand how the components come together to achieve the desired functionality.

Key requirements

This section outlines the primary functional requirements that shape the design of the Stack Overflow system.

1. Any guest can view and search questions by tag, username, or word.

2. Users should be able to post new questions and add answers to an open question.

3. Users can flag a question, answer, or comment if anything goes against the community guidelines.

4. Users can upvote, downvote, and add comments to a question or answer, but they can only upvote a comment.

5. Users can vote to delete or close off questions for community-specific reasons. However, they can only vote to delete an answer.

6. Users can add a bounty to their question to attract more answers.

7. Moderators can close a question or restore an already deleted question. Moderators can also delete answers.

8. The system should notify the user whenever there has been an interaction with them.

9. Users can earn badges for their helpful answers or comments.

10. The system should also be able to determine the most popular tags used in questions. ...