Description:
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) gives you a chance to create a wide variety of software-engineering documents, but what are the steps required to build successful, even military-quality, software? Use Cases Combined with BOOCH/OMT/UML provides a "cookbook," or design guide, to creating software based on use cases, while stressing software requirements and testing. This text begins with a discussion of its software methodology (which is based on Ivar Jacobson's Use Case methodology). The authors stress software requirements and a "requirements traceability matrix." This is the list of user requirements that will furnish a blueprint for design, implementation, and testing. Based on this requirements list, the authors discuss the use cases, which show how actors interact with software and hardware. The chosen single case study here is certainly idiosyncratic: a "habitat control center" for monitoring the air pressure, temperature, and oxygen level for 48 living quarters in a sealed environment. The chosen case study highlights the authors' belief that critical and reliable software can be created using their process. Further steps in the design add classes (and groups of classes, called categories) to this requirements matrix. Along the way, this text provides project tracking and testing steps for validating software. All the major UML diagram types are introduced, including class, collaboration, statechart, and activity diagrams. The authors also pay attention to actual coding (or implementation) of their design. (Finished versions of their designs are provided in C++, Java, and Ada95 on the accompanying CD-ROM.) In all, Use Cases Combined with BOOCH/OMT/UML shows that UML can work within a powerful software process that would seem to have a lot of potential to deliver on-time, highly robust software systems. It's up to readers to decide for themselves, but this software process seems to offer some real advantages. --Richard Dragan
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