Planning our work

The software we'll be building in this chapter isn't meant to be extremely complex – we'll create a simple calculator that adds two numbers together (Figure 12.1). It will be released as a console application with a text user interface and a library to perform mathematical operations, which can potentially be used in another project. While there isn't much use for such a project in real life, as C++ offers plenty of support for calculations in its standard library, its banality will be perfect to explore how all techniques discussed in this book work together in practice:

Figure 12.1 – The two states of a console calculator's user interface

Usually, projects either produce a user-facing executable or a library for developers. Projects that do both are a bit rarer but not totally uncommon – some applications offer standalone SDKs or libraries supporting the creation of plugins. Another case may...