Using UML : Software Engineering With Objects and Components - Softcover

Perdita Stevens; Rob Pooley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201360675 ISBN 13: 9780201360677

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd), 1998

Synopsis

Using UML is an introduction to the Unified Modeling Language for students learning about object- and component-based software design and development. It places UML in the context of the software engineering discipline as a whole, providing students with a practical understanding of good practice in software design and development. The authors present a broad view of the subject area, enabling students to see for themselves how different practices may be appropriate for different situations. The goal of the book is to encourage pragmatic and open-minded approach to real-life software engineering.

About this title

About the Author

Dr Rob Pooley is Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.

Dr. Perdita Stevens is a Lecturer/Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. She has recent industrial experience of OO development, mostly using Booch's method. In addition to her Edinburgh lecturing experience, she tutored the Open University course "Object-Oriented Software Technology" (based on Rumbaugh's OMT) for several years, gaining insight into how students learn to use a modelling language.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

UML, the Unified Modelling Language, has been adopted as standard by the OMG. Realising that students increasingly need to know it, we introduced it as the modelling language for our two redesigned undergraduate courses, for third and fourth year students. Unfortunately we found that there was no suitable textbook; what material there was on UML was principally aimed at experienced developers, not students. So we decided we'd have to write the textbook ourselves, and this book is the result. The philosophy of the book is to be eclectic. Some readers will be offended that we have not jumped onto one or another bandwagon and declare how object oriented development should be done. This is deliberate. We do not think any one faction has a monopoly on truth; we think most successful OO developments in practice use techniques from several; we think it unfair to students to try to sell them the idea that one way is best.

How to use this book

This book is in four parts. Inevitably they overlap and are interrelated. We describe each part, and then show some paths through the book.

Part 1 introduces the concepts of software engineering and object orientated development.

Part 2 covers UML, the language. For most major diagram types there are two chapters. The first chapter covers the basic material that any UML user needs to know. The second covers more advanced or specialised features, which readers will want to know before undertaking serious UML development, but which is better studied after a good understanding of the core material is achieved. In our experience confusion as a result of half understanding too many features is a much more serious problem than ignorance of less central features.

Part 3 consists of three case studies. These are designed as starting points. The book's web page has code for the functionality analysed in the chapters, but the chapters also include hints for possible further extensions.

Part 4 discusses quality and quality assurance, verification validation and testing, software project management, teamwork, etc. We concentrate on the differences between the iterative, component based development model and a traditional waterfall approach. We give many pointers to other parts of this very large field of study.

Paths through the book

The dependency graph above is a bit misleading: it implies that nothing ever depends on anything that comes later in the book! Of course we have tried to keep these situations to a minimum: but it's impossible to eliminate circular dependencies between, for example, understanding the need for design and what it is, understanding a modelling language, and examples. So, while we encourage you to use the book in whatever way seems most useful, some orders that we suggest are:

* For people new to OO: 1,2,3,4,5,7,9,11,15
* For people familiar with OO: 3, then any subsequence of 5 - 20
* For people with some OO experience particularly interested in applying O and UML in practice: skim 1 - 4, then 5,7,9,11,13,14,17,18,19,20.

Special sections

Some special sections need explanation: Panels, shown ... , describe topics which are important, but don't completely fit the flow of the rest of the chapter in which they occur. Several design techniques are included in the Part 2 chapters in this way. Technical UML notes, shown ..., will be of interest to readers who want to understand how what we say relates to the primary UML source material, its notation guide and semantics. Questions, shown ..., are intended to be straightforward; they act as an understanding check. Discussion questions, shown ..., are more interesting: they require discussion, more thought, or research using materials other than this book, such as material pointed to from the book's web page. We use these questions as the basis for small-group discussion and feedback within lectures; we hope they will also be useful material for tutorials and coursework, or just for provoking thought.

Note for lecturers

This book is intended as a textbook for higher year (e.g. English 2nd and 3rd year, Scottish 3rd and 4th year) students of Computer Science, Software Engineering and similar courses. Its early chapters are also intended to be readable as background to introductory informatics courses for students in earlier years. Our fourth year course is also available to MSc students, so this book has been written to be adaptable for use with a wide range of students. The book has both a publicly available Web page (mentioned above), and a password protected site which is not made available to students. Contact the publishers for details of access to the latter, which contains answers to the exercises, further notes, and perhaps most helpfully details of a larger case study than any in this book. (The latter is, however, based on publicly available code, which should be borne in mind if it is to be used for assessment!)

We deliberately do not teach a programming language in this book. There are three reasons.

1. The range of programming languages used in relevant courses is so large (even here at Edinburgh, we have not settled the Java/C++ question), and for each possible language there are already many resources available to teach the specifics of the language. We have collected some links to free teaching material for various OOPLs on the book's web page: please send us more!

2. We wanted to write a short, manageable, affordable book.

3. Most importantly, we feel it is very important for students to realise to how large an extent the issues involved in OOA/D are language independent.

At Edinburgh, we use the material in this book for two courses. Our third year course, Software Engineering with Objects and Components 1, covers most of the material in Chapters 1 - 4, 5, 7, and 9, and also teaches an object oriented programming language (in our case, C++ or Java). By the end of this course we expect students to understand the concepts of OO, CBD and software engineering and to be able to do detailed design (but does not focus on high level analysis or architecture). Our fourth year course, Software Engineering with Objects and Components 2, deepens students' understanding of design and the UML (the remaining chapters of Part 2), and explores the harder issues of analysis and architecture. It goes on to deal with the material of Part 4, encouraging a pragmatic, open-minded approach to real-life software engineering. To support this, in SEOC2 we make heavy use of open-ended questions and we encourage students to use other resources, especially the Web. (We think this is an important habit to establish, given the speed at which the field of software engineering is likely to continue to move during these students' careers.) Many of the Discussion Questions in Part 4 of the book require students to use other resources to investigate questions. To help with this, the book's public home page includes a collection of links to relevant papers and useful starting points. Some of these links are mentioned specifically in the text. Of course we cannot guarantee that the owners of these pieces of material will continue to keep them available, but we will do our best to maintain the links: please let us know of any problems, and send us further links that may be useful to readers.

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd)
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0201360675
• ISBN 13: 9780201360677
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280