TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter surveys the most significant object-oriented design and analysis methods to emerge since the late 1980s. It concentrates primarily on OOA (Coad and Yourdon, 1991), Booch (Booch, 1991, 1994), Object Modeling Technique (Rumbaugh et al., 1991), Objectory (Jacobson, 1992) and Fusion (Coleman et al., 1994). It also introduces the Unified Modeling Language (Booch et al., 1996; Booch and Rumbaugh, 1995).
This chapter does not aim to deal comprehensively with either the range of methods available or the fine details of each approach. Rather, it provides an overview of the design process and the strengths and weaknesses of some important and reasonably representative methods.
The object-oriented design methods that we consider are all architecture-driven, incremental and iterative. They do not adopt the more traditional waterfall software development model; instead they adopt an approach which is more akin to the spiral model of Boehm (1988). This reflects developers' experiences when creating object-oriented systems the object-oriented development process is more incremental than that for procedural systems, with less distinct barriers between analysis, design and implementation. Some organizations take this process to the extreme and adopt an evolutionary development approach. This approach delivers system functions to users in very small steps and revises project plans in the light of experience and user feedback. This philosophy has proved very successful for organizations that have fully embraced it and has led to earlier business benefits and successful end-products from large development projects.
We first...
