Software Design Methodologies: UML in Action: Dr. Mohamed Fayad, J.D. Edwards Professor

Software Design Methodologies:
UML in Action
Dr. Mohamed Fayad, J.D. Edwards Professor

Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Ferguson Hall, P.O. Box 880115
Lincoln, NE 68588-0115
http://www.cse.unl.edu/~fayad
May-June 2001 ISISTAN Research Institute – Tandil,

Argentina
Lesson 5:
Object Identification - 2
2
May-June 2001 ISISTAN Research Institute – Tandil, L5-S2 Object Identification- 2
Argentina -- M.E. Fayad
Lesson Objectives
+ Learn how to identify:
Associations and aggregations
Attributes
Objectives
Behaviors
Inheritance
+ Understand how to use the following approaches:
Use Case
CRC
Questioning Techniques
+ Understand how to refine objects and associations
+ Learn how to define responsibility & collaborations
+ Learn how to eliminate unnecessary classes,
associations, and attributes
3
Automated Teller Machine (ATM)
Stop bothering me!

I told you I don’t have
any money!
4
Actors
Customer Automated
Teller
Machine Bank System
ATM Operator
In Use Cases, Everything that interacts with the system will be

modeled as an actor, such as persons as well as machines. 5
Use Cases in ATM
Automated Teller Machine
Cash Withdrawal
Customer Transfer Funds
Bank System
Deposit Funds
Balance Inquiry
ATM Operator
System Start
6
A Use Case Description: Cash Withdrawal
Use Case: Cash Withdrawal
 When a customer inserts a card in the ATM, the machine
reads the code from the card and checks if it is a valid card.
If the card is valid then the machine queries the customer
for a PIN number, else the card is ejected.
 When the machine matches customer coded in the PIN
number, the machine checks the validity of the PIN number.
If the PIN number is correct and matches the card number
then the machine asks for the desired transaction the
customer wishes to perform.
 When the customer selects cash withdrawal the machine
asks for the desired amount with a warning indicating only
multiple of $10 is allowed.
7
 When ....

Candidate Objects
 Account • User Message

 ATM • Numeric Keypad
 Balance Inquiry • Numeric Input Key
 Bank Card Reader • PIN
 Cancel Key • Cash
 Cash Dispenser
• Receipt Printer
 Deposit Slot
• Special Input Key
 Deposit Funds
• Transfer Funds
 Display Screen (Bank System
Interface) • Cash Withdrawal
 Menu (Graphical User Interface)
8
System Responsibilities & Collaborations
 Define Responsibilities
– What are the goals of the system
– What must objects know to meet goals
– What steps must each object accomplish
 Determine Collaborations
– Decompose responsibilities into interactions
among objects
– Define clients and servers
– Where should knowledge be held 9
CRC Cards
 General
– Each class is described on a separate 3X5 or 4X6 card
 The cards are known as CRC card. They have 3 sections:
– Class
– Responsibilities
– Collaborations
ATM (role)
Responsibility Collaboration
Server Clients
Access & modify account balance Account (role) Balance Inquiry
Deposit Transaction
Funds Transfer
Withdrawal Transaction 10
Other Techniques Help Refine Objects
 Generalize and Specialize objects
 Associate Objects
 Recognize Accidental Objects
 Challenging and Testing Objects
 Ask Questions 11
Explore Generalizations and Specializations
 Generalization exposes commonalities

 Exercise helps to identify new classes
 Considerations for generalizations and
specializations
– Is it in the problem domain?
– Is it within the system’s responsibilities?
– Will there be inheritance?
12
Avoid Accidental Objects
 Essential objects represent

genuine high-level abstractions
 Accidental objects represent

qualitative judgments
13
Challenge Objects
 Needed Remembrance -- attributes
 Needed Behavior -- methods
 Usually Multiple Services per Object
 Usually More than One Object per Class
14
Other Object Tests
 Uniformity Test
– Each instance must have the same set of characteristics
and be subject to the same rules - Car license
 More than a Name Test
– Every object has attributes, if not it is probably an
attribute of another object -- home address
 Or Test
– If inclusion criteria should not use “OR” in any significant
way -- driver’s license number or learner’s permit number
 More Than a List Test
– If inclusion criteria is only a list of instances -- decadent
foods includes croissant , cappuccino, chocolate pie, ice
cream.
15
Final Object Checklist
 Something universal and real for reuse

 Should encapsulate some reasonably
complex behavior to justify existence
 Methods that don’t make use of its current
class’s own attributes is probably
encapsulated in the wrong object.
 Small and simple stable interfaces
 Self sufficient and complete 16
Questioning Techniques Help Elicit Domain Knowledge
 Play Twenty Questions
– Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?
– Does it have fur or feathers?
– Can it fly?
 Define Boundaries
– What else?
– What about..?
 Quantify Qualities as Attributes
– How fast?
17
– How hot?

Eliminating Unnecessary Associations
 Irrelevant Associations
– outside problem domain
 Implementation Associations
– Examples: concurrent process,
contains a list
 Associations Between Eliminated
Classes
18
Eliminating Unnecessary Associations (cont’d)
 Actions or Transient Events

– Examples: “Interacts with the Robot”, “ATM
accepts cash card.”
 Ternary Associations
– Decompose as binary associations or rephrase
to one binary association.
 Derived Associations
– These are redundant
– Examples: “Younger than ..” derived from age
19
Refine Association List
 Choose meaningful association names

 Add role names where appropriate
 Add attributes or associations which qualify existing
associations
– Example: “Standard Oil of Ohio” uses state attribute to
qualify company name.
 Specify one-to-many and many-to-many associations
in the class diagram
 Add missing associations
– Not in problem statement
– from knowledge of application domain
20
Identifying Attributes
 Attributes can be thought as a simple
association with a value which is not an object
– Examples: name, age, weight
 Usually corresponding to nouns followed by
possessive phrases
– Examples: “color of the car”, “age of the donor”
 Less likely to be fully described in the problem
statement
 Included in the class box diagram
 Not as relevant to the problem structure as
associations 21
Attribute Types
 Descriptive Attributes
 Naming Attributes
 Referential Attributes
22
Descriptive Attributes
 Provide facts intrinsic to each

instance of the object.
– Examples Account.balance, Cat.weight
– If the value of a descriptive attribute

changes, it means only that some aspect
of an instance has changed, but the
instance is still the same instance.
23
Naming Attributes
 Are used to name or label instances.

– Examples:Account.number, Flight.number
– Names are typically somewhat arbitrary
– Naming attributes are frequently used as an

identifier or part of an identifier.
– If the vale of a naming attribute changes, it means

only that a new name has been given to exactly
the same instance 24
Referential Attributes
 Are used to tie an instance of one

object to an instance of another.
– Examples: Cat.owner name indicates which person
owns this cat.
– If the vale of a referential attribute changes, it means

that different instances are now being associated.
25
Rules of Attributes
 First Rule:
 One instance of an object or a class has exactly one value
for each attribute at any given time.
Employee M/S Phone
OK M. Fayad 171 4356
G. Smee 23 3456
Not OK 7890
Not OK L. Harris 1234
[Shlaer-Mellor 90]
26
Rules of Attributes (cont’d)
 Second Rule:
 An attribute must contain no internal
structure
 Examples:
– Age, balance, size are all OK.
– A name consists of first name, middle initial, and
last name (Not OK)
– An address contains house number, street name,
city, state, zip code, and country name (Not OK)
27
 Third Rule:
 When an object has a compound identifier -- that is, one
made up of two or more attributes -- every attribute that is
not part of the identifier represents a characteristic of the
entire object.
Juice Transfer The juice Transfer.gallons attribute

means that the number of gallons
storage Tank ID transferred from the storage tank to
cooking Tank ID the cooking tank and not the number
of gallons in either the storage tank or
gallons
plannedTime
the cooking tank.
28
 Fourth Rule:
 Each attribute is not part of an identifier that represents
a characteristic of the instance named by the identifier
and a characteristic of some other non-identifier attribute
Batch
The Batch.cookingTime attribute must
batch ID represent the actual time the batch was
recipe ID cooked, and not the cooking time
gallons specified by the recipe
cookingTime
29
Eliminating Unnecessary Attributes
 Do not keep attributes that have an object

as a value, they are associations
 Do not keep attributes that depend on a

context, these are qualifiers for associations
 If an object can have more that one name,

then the name qualifies an association of
that object with another
30
Eliminating Unnecessary Attributes (cont’d)
 Do not put attributes of the association in one or
the other of the objects involved in the association,
put the attributes in the association itself
 Eliminate attributes which are only used internally
by the object
 Keep initial analysis of attributes at a high level
 Eliminate attributes which are too low level
 Attributes which are in some instances of a class,
but not in others, indicate that the class should be
split into two or more classes 31
Identifying Inheritance
 Identify classes which share common information
 Three basic approaches:
 Bottom Up
– Look for classes with repeated associations, attributes or behaviors,
and group together into higher level classes
– This approach is easier for inexperienced modelers
 Top Down
– Look for Noun phrases describing different kinds of things in the
problem statement.
– Examples: Family cars, Sports cars, Luxury cars
 Combination of the two approaches works the best.
– Do Top Down when doing initial analysis
– Identify repeated information in the late passes.
32
Identifying Inheritance (cont’d)
 Always use the “AKO” test
– All inheritance specifications should identify one or
more classes which are “A Kind Of” a higher level
class.
– NEVER use inheritance for “Part / Part-of”
relationships
 Use multiple inheritance only when necessary

– Some object-oriented programming languages do not
even have this feature.
33
Identifying Behaviors
 Done in latest stages
 List of behaviors can become large and get detailed
quickly.
 May correspond to queries about attributes and
associations
– Operations to read or write attribute or association value
– Examples: user name, property value, etc.
 May correspond to events or activities
– Examples: begin simulation, alert, calculate balance,
computer distance
34
Experience and Domain Knowledge
 Good objects come from language of domain

– If you are not an expert -- consult users
 Experience will tune decisions

– Slowly at first
– Much faster later
Just do it!
35
Discussion Questions
• Define with examples: CRC cards, associate objects, referential

attributes.
• Describe the third norm for testing objects
• What are the differences between essential objects and accidental
objects
• What are questioning techniques and their purposes?
• Describe how do you identify: associations , aggregations,
inheritance, attributes, and behaviors
• Describe how to refine objects and associations
• Explain how to define responsibilities and collaborations
36
Questions for the Next Lecture
Define:
– Guidelines
– Heuristics
What do you think of these heuristics

– A designer should distribute system
intelligence uniformly among the top
level classes in the system.
– A designer should have 4.6 top level
classes per 1,000 lines of code.
– Eliminate classes that are outside the
system
37

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Software Design Methodologies:

Dr. Mohamed Fayad, J.D. Edwards Professor

May-June 2001 ISISTAN Research Institute – Tandil,

Stop bothering me!

In Use Cases, Everything that interacts with the system will be

Customer Transfer Funds

May-June 2001 ISISTAN Research Institute – Tandil, L5-S7 Object Identification- 2

 Account • User Message

 Generalize and Specialize objects

 Recognize Accidental Objects

 Challenging and Testing Objects

 Generalization exposes commonalities

 Essential objects represent

 Accidental objects represent

 Needed Remembrance -- attributes

 Needed Behavior -- methods

 Usually Multiple Services per Object

 Usually More than One Object per Class

 Something universal and real for reuse

May-June 2001 ISISTAN Research Institute – Tandil, L5-S17 Object Identification- 2

 Actions or Transient Events

 Choose meaningful association names

 Provide facts intrinsic to each

– If the value of a descriptive attribute

 Are used to name or label instances.

– Names are typically somewhat arbitrary

– Naming attributes are frequently used as an

– If the vale of a naming attribute changes, it means

 Are used to tie an instance of one

– If the vale of a referential attribute changes, it means

Employee M/S Phone

OK M. Fayad 171 4356

Not OK L. Harris 1234

Juice Transfer The juice Transfer.gallons attribute

 Do not keep attributes that have an object

 Do not keep attributes that depend on a

 If an object can have more that one name,

 Use multiple inheritance only when necessary

 Good objects come from language of domain

 Experience will tune decisions

• Define with examples: CRC cards, associate objects, referential

What do you think of these heuristics

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