Question

Explain all the available types of diagrams that can be used to represent object interactions. Your explanation should include the characteristics of these diagrams and its main purpose

Subject : Object Oriented Analaysis and Design

Answer 1

The Booch Method is a well documented proven method for Object Oriented Analysis and Design. It focus on development of  four fundamental models such as logical model, physical model, static model and dynamic model.In the Booch method, an engineer can document the models with several different diagrams. Some diagram can contain information from sveral models , and some models can include information that ends up in several diagram. Commonly there are six diagrams. They are explained below.

(1) Class Diagram

It shows the existence of classes and their relationships in the logical view of the system. The purpose of class diagram is to model the static view of an application. It is the only diagrams which can be directly mapped with object-oriented languages. Notations used in it are:

• Classes : Classes represent an abstraction of entities with common characteristics.
• Composition and Aggregation : Composition is a special type of aggregation that denotes a strong ownership between Class A and class B
• Association : It is the link betweem two classes to communicate.
• Key : An attribute whose value uniquely identify single object.
• Constraint : Condition
• Cardinality : It indicates the number of instances of one class linked to one instance of the other class.
• Role : How the object see each other.

(2) Object Diagram

An object diagram, or for our purpose here an object-scenario diagram shows the existence of objects, their relationships in the logical view of the system, and how they execute a particular scenario or use-case. It means the object diagram is closer to the actual system behavior. The purpose is to capture the static view of a system at a particular moment. It includes,

• Object Names : Every object is actually symbolized like a rectangle, that offers the name from the object and its class underlined as well as divided with a colon.
• Object attributes : Unlike classes, object attributes should have values assigned for them.
• Links : Links tend to be instances associated with associations. You can draw a link while using the lines utilized in class diagrams.

(3) Module Diagram

A module diagram shows the allocation of classes and objects to modules in the physical view of a system, that is module diagrams indicate the partitioning of the system architecture. Through these diagrams it is possible to understand the general physical architecture of a system. The two essential elements of a module diagram are modules and their dependencies. It includes,

• Specification and body
• Main program : There may be no cycles within a set of compilation dependencies. In C++ this is indicated by #include directives.
• Subsystems : We can place the modules in different subsystems.

(4) State Transition Diagram

It shows the state space of a given context, the events that cause a transition from one state to another, and the actions that result. These are used to model objects which have a finite number of possible states and whose interaction with the outside world can be described by its state changes in response to a finite number of events. It includes,

• State icon
• History : The state remembers his last state, when you enter it.
• Nesting : Nesting states within a composite mean that events that should be processed for all nested states can be shown using a single transition

(5) Interaction Diagram

It illustrate how objects interact via messages. They are used for dynamic object modeling. It is recommended to use interaction diagrams, if you are working in a real-time environment. The purpose of interaction diagrams is to visualize the interactive behavior of the system. Visualizing the interaction is a difficult task.

We have two types of interaction diagrams in UML. One is the sequence diagram and the other is the collaboration diagram. The sequence diagram shows the time sequence of the message flow from one object to another and the collaboration diagram shows the organization of objects in a system taking part in the message flow.

(6) Process Diagram

It is used to show allocation of processes to processors in the physical design. It’s used to document a process, improve a process or model a new one. It has many puposes such as

• To document a process for better understanding, quality control and training of employees.
• To standardize a process for optimal efficiency and repeatability. etc.

It includes the elements such as major equipment, process piping, process flow direction, operational data etc.

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