The Challenge of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design

With the needs of the business world becoming entangled in a web of complexities such as conflicting requirements, potential miscommunication , and technological risks, it is imperative for software development teams to adopt a technique that can effectively capture the real-world context for business requirements and problems (the problem domain ), and then evolve them towards defining a software solution.

The value of using object-oriented analysis and design techniques for developing software derives from two facts; it enables the real world business complexity to be addressed in a very modular and disciplined manner, and promotes the development of software solutions that are inherently maintainable over time.

However, prerequisites exist for designing object-oriented software solutions. The first is fluent communication among everyone involved in creating and deploying the software solution ”the more complex the solution, the more critical communication becomes. The second prerequisite is a unified language that describes concisely and without misinterpretations the software analysis and design tasks at hand that will ultimately dictate the solution system.

In the past, there were "Method Wars" where many formal object-oriented software development methodologies, each with its own proprietary language, battled to be the standard approach for capturing the analysis and design efforts of a project. This was a trying time for everyone involved in object-oriented development projects because there was no consistency in how software solutions were methodically analyzed , designed, and developed. The leading methodologists in this paradigm ”Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobsen, also known as the "Three Amigos," resolved this frustration by establishing the Unified Modeling Language , or UML, which today has emerged as the de facto software development blueprint language.

As a software developer, you will be challenged to create software solutions where the need for the solution initially surfaced as a problem to be solved . This chapter's focus is to explain clearly how to use UML effectively in the Analysis and Design phases of a software development lifecycle.