Chapter 7: Logical Design

Overview

In contrast to the user- and task-centric views of conceptual design, logical design in an object-oriented environment looks at an application as a series of classes and objects. During the logical design phase, application designers make high-level decisions about the application architecture. In an object-oriented programming environment, this involves creating a design based on classes, attributes, and behaviors.

We are still not ready to begin coding yet, although we are starting to think about the application more in terms of a set of related components. Whereas conceptual design was completely abstract, logical design is slightly more tangible. The logical design constructed will better resemble the architecture of the final application than the conceptual design. In this chapter, we will move away from the boxes and lines that make up conceptual diagrams to the more complex shapes that make up Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams and other logical design notations.

Exam Watch

Although the Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides many helpful tools for logical design and is a popular industry-standard notation for software modeling, it is not one of the certification objectives for this exam. Therefore, you should not expect any UML-related questions on the exam.