Creating Use Case Diagrams

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The Project Specification: Robot Rat

To demonstrate how a UML design tool can help I will revisit the robot rat project first presented in chapter 3. This version of robot rat will have much more capability than the version designed and coded in chapter 3. The project specification is given in figure 20-2 below.

Figure 20-2: Robot Rat Project Specification

As you can see by comparison with the earlier robot rat project there is much more to do here. The primary differences are: 1) The program must be able to create multiple robot rat objects and control their movements around the floor, 2) the program's architecture must support the creation of different types of remote controlled objects besides rats. Perhaps at some point in the future remote controlled people objects will have to be added. The application architecture must be designed to facilitate such anticipated changes, and 3) the notion of the rats and the visually displayed floor upon which they roam are now separated. All user interface functions, including the floor pattern display, are to be handled by a class that is separate from the class that actually controls or manages robot rat objects.

All these additional robot rat requirements call for the design and implementation of quite a different program from the one created to satisfy the original robot rat requirements.

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