HFOOAD Chapter 6

--Originally published at Hackerman's house

Chapter 6 is called My Name is Art Vandelay…I am an Architect, it shows how to use the tools we already know to build bigger programs and handle big problems. To solve these big problems, you must remember the steps, we already learned, making sure that the software does what the customer wants, apply basic object-oriented principles and create maintainable software. Using this knowledge, you can approach the big problem as a group of smaller problems that you can attack individually.
Ball

Photo by Kay Ramslay

In the case that you are working in a big system of software, the analysis becomes even more important. There are more elements in the software, this means the cohesion between all its parts become essential in the creation of good software. A good advice given by the book is that first you have to analyze the individual pieces, and after that you analyze the way the interact with each other.

Just like in the previous chapter the interaction with the client is very important to determine the requirements of the system, and what is the purpose of the software. A new term is introduced Feature, a feature is something big that a system does, usually you must do a series of requirements to complete a feature. This means it is basically a more complex requirement.

Get features from the customer, and then figure out the requirements you need to implement those features

Sometimes you need to know what a system does, but don’t want to get into all the detail that use cases require. This is where you can utilize use case diagrams to see the bigger picture. The diagram consists on the actor that is related to the system, the system, and the use cases inside the system (the use cases are

Resultado de imagen para use case diagram
just by a title, giving a vague idea of what it does); it is easy to read and help you figure out the big picture. You can use your feature list to make sure the use case diagram is complete.

Resultado de imagen para use case diagram