Before haveing additional interviews, the development team first must work within the context of the business-process interview. This is the job of an object modeler. The objective is to produce initial class diagram.
The
object modeler looks for nouns, verbs and verb phrases. Some of the nouns will become
classes in the model, some will become attributes. The verb and verb phrases can become
operations or the labels of associations.
Let's put ourselves in the role of the modeler and start developing the class diagram. From the client's interview we can filtered out these nouns:
And these verbs:
go, search, lend, take, sort, print, put, do, has, have, convert, write, manage, access, read, preview, take a sample, reserve, give, inform, make, set free, check the data, recommend, post, buy, operate, maintain, conclude, browse, input |
Now we'll try to form some meaningful groups of nouns.
One group consists of people:
member, author, employee, lender, DatabaseSpecialist, DataEntry clerk. This group could
stand some subdivision because everyone except the member and author are employees.
Another group consists of library's items
like books, journals, samples, reservation, lending.
Third group consists of areas within the library:
corridor, lending area, reception place.
In forth group may be these nouns: member's card, data record, paper card, multimedia
data, lending record.
Abstract classes partition the class diagram into meaningful groups |
This is the initial class diagram, next we'll discover associations between classes and produce more descriptive class diagram tha this one.