Conceptual Modeling
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Object-Oriented Analysis
OOA is a collection of like-minded requirements modeling and analysis techniques for software systems. Proposed in the late 80s, such techniques have been influenced primarily by object-oriented programming, but also semantic data models and semantic networks. Basic idea: streamline software development by making objects, classes, methods and the like atomic units out of which one builds requirements, designs and implementations.
Conceptual Modeling
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Basic Concepts
Such techniques focus on the things that exist within the application domain, model them with objects..
These techniques use classification, generalization, aggregation to structure object assemblies. Actions (services/activities) are associated with objects.
State changes are effected by actions performed on objects.
Conceptual Modeling
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Origins of Object-Oriented Analysis
Object-Oriented Programming -- tries to adopt as many of the O-O programming features to O-O design and analysis [Booch86] Database Design -- adopts semantic data modeling ideas, including E-R diagrams and generalization, aggregation, classification [Chen76] Structured Analysis -- including SADT and other structured analysis techniques [Ross77] Knowledge Representation -- uses ideas from framebased and semantic network representations [Borgida85]
Conceptual Modeling
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Coads Object-Oriented Analysis
Proposed by Peter Coad [Coad91]. An object is defined as a real world entity related to the problem domain, with crisply defined boundaries. Objects are encapsulated with attributes and behaviour. OOA offers five kinds of concepts: objects, attributes, structures, services and subjects.
Conceptual Modeling
Gen-Spec Structures
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Gen-Spec (generalization/specialization) structures organize classes into taxonomies. Patients are either in-patients or outpatients. The physician attribute of patients is inherited by both in-patients and out-patients.
Conceptual Modeling
Whole-Part Structures
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Whole-Part structures describe an object as an assembly of other objects. A traffic light consists of 0 to 3 lampAssemblies, a single support and a single location.
Conceptual Modeling
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Services
Objects provide services to other objects in their environments. For example, a physician object may provide services examine, report. Coad distinguishes three types of services:
Occurrence services, whereby objects are created, destroyed, changed; Calculate services, where an object performs a calculation for some other object; Monitor services, where an object is monitoring some process to see if some condition applies;
A special notation is used (dashed-line arrow) to indicate that an object is using services from another object.
Conceptual Modeling
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Services and Relationships
Conceptual Modeling
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Methodology
Identify objects and classes classes (i.e., generic objects) Identify structures and build generalization, aggregation hierarchies. Define subjects. These partition all the objects and classes of an object model into subject layers, which represent the application from a particular perspective. Often whole Gen-Spec or Part-Whole structures are grouped under one subject.
Identify information that should be associated with each object. Place attributes at the right structural level.
Define services for each class.
Conceptual Modeling
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Terminology
Conceptual Modeling
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What is Good About OOA?
Advances the state-of-practice! Earlier prevalent modeling techniques, such as structured analysis (SA), data flow diagrams (DFD), entity-relationship diagrams (ERD),...were:
fragmented, e.g., use of data flow and entity-relationship
diagrams
weakly structured: see DFD and ERD informal: see DFD based on an outdated programming paradigm (structured programming)
Conceptual Modeling
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What is Questionable About OOA?
Is OOA intended for modeling software, or applications? If only the former, then it is not meant for requirements modeling! Its ontological assumptions. Who says that objects, relationships, services and the like constitute a good set of primitive concepts for modeling the real world? ...organizations? ...people? ...industrial processes? The promise of easier design and implementation wont work for large systems where requirements, design and implementation have drastically different architectures and are based on very different concepts.
Conceptual Modeling
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What does this model, a system, or the real world?
Conceptual Modeling
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The Unified Modeling Language (UML)
Booch and Rumbaugh started working towards a unified modeling language (UML) in 1994 under the auspices of Rational Inc. They were later joined by Jacobson. UML only offers a notation, not a methodology for modeling (as various OOA techniques do). Combines Jacobsons use cases with Booch and Rumbaugh concepts for object modeling, along with statecharts. UML has been adopted by the Object ManagementGroup (OMG) as an (object) modeling standard. OMG UML 1.0 is the first version of this new modeling standard.
Conceptual Modeling
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References
[Booch86] Booch, G., Object-Oriented Development, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 12(2), February 1986. [Booch94] Booch, G., Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, BenjaminCummings, 1994 (2nd edition). [Coad91] Coad, P. and Yourdon, E., Object-Oriented Analysis, Prentice Hall, 1991. [Jacobson92] Jacobson, I., Christerson, M., Jonsson, P., Overgaard, G., Object-Oriented Software Engineering, Addison-Wesley, 1992. [Martin93] Martin, J., Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, Prentice-Hall, 1993. [Rumbaugh91] Rumbaugh, J., Blaha, M., Premerlani, W., Eddy, F., Lorensen, W., Object-Oriented Modeling and Design, Prentice-Hall, 1991. [UML00] http://www.rational.com
