Week 8

Textbooks, journal articles and websites that define traditional and object-oriented approaches to information systems development and describe their similarities and differences.

Rob, MA 2006, ‘Dilemma  between the  Structured  and Object-Oriented Approaches  to Systems  Analysis  and  Design’,  The Journal of Computer Information Systems, Vol. 46, Iss. 3; pp. 32.

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in adapting object-oriented (OO) concepts, UML, and Unified Process of system development in the Systems Analysis and Design texts. However, there is a question of how to best fit these concepts with the existing coherent discussion of structured approach. This paper addresses some of the intricacies of OO concepts such as complexity of diagrams and models, weak links between phases, and lack of support for designing system components. We would like to recommend that there should be a separate text for the OO methodology and it should not present various OO models according to the phases of the traditional structured approach, rather it should focus on the evolution of the models leading to the design of the system components. Furthermore, there should be a standard set of models for the OO methodology as well as a clear definition of steps as an analyst moves from one set of models to the next.

 

 

Wieringa, R 1998, ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 30 ,  Issue 4, pp. 459 – 527

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299917.299919 This article surveys techniques used in structured and object-oriented software specification methods. The techniques are classified as techniques for the specification of external interaction and internal decomposition. The external specification techniques are further subdivided into techniques for the specification of functions, behavior, and communication. After surveying the techniques, we summarize the way they are used in structured and object-oriented methods and indicate ways in which they can be combined. This article ends with a plea for simplicity in diagram techniques and for the use of formal semantics to define these techniques. The appendices show how the reviewed techniques are used in 6 structured and 19 object-oriented specification methods.   Qian, H , Fernandez, EB 1995, “A combined functional and object-oriented approach to software design,”  First IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, pp 167. http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/proceedings/&toc=comp/proceedings/iceccs/1995/7123/00/7123toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/ICECCS.1995.479323 Large and complex software systems contain a variety of entities (objects) and a complex control system (transformation function). The pure object-oriented design and structured design approaches concentrate on either objects or the transformation function separately. As such they may not be adequate in isolation, to deal with the design of complex systems. Therefore, it makes sense to study their combination. We propose a combined functional and object-oriented design approach (CFOOD) based on the extended object-oriented design method proposed by P. Jalote (1989, 1991). The CFOOD approach makes full use of the object-oriented design and structured design techniques combining the object view and the functional view to provide a more complete view of a system. We demonstrate the use of our approach by a design example of a hospital patient monitoring system.