Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: A Practical Approach

Applied Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: An Annotated e-Commerce Example provides a practical, hands-on guide to putting use case methods to work in real-world situations. This companion workbook to Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML bridges the gap between the theory presented in the authors' first book, and the practical issues involved in the development of an internet/e-commerce application.

Uniquely conceived as a workbook, featuring an e-commerce system for an on-line bookstore as a running example, the book dissects its design in detail, demonstrates the most common design mistakes, and reveals the correct solutions. The hands-on exercises give you the opportunity to detect, identify, and correct critical errors on your own, before reviewing the solutions provided in the book.

The workbook is structured around the proven ICONIX Process, a streamlined approach to UML modeling designed to avoid analysis paralysis without skipping analysis and design. It presents the four key phases of this minimalist approach to use case driven design: domain modeling; use case modeling; robustness analysis; and sequence diagramming. For each of these topics, the book provides an overview, detailed discussion, top 10 mistakes, and a set of exercises for honing object modeling and design skills.

Another unique aspect of this book is the three chapters on reviews. The authors devote a chapter each to requirements review; preliminary design review; and critical design review. This focus on "designing quality in" by teaching how to review UML models fills a major gap in the published literature.

The book shows you, by example, how to avoid more than 70 specific design errors as shown in the "Top 10" error lists on the inside covers and within each chapter. With the information, examples, and exercises in this book, you will develop the knowledge and skills you need to apply use case modeling more effectively to your next application.

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This compact and concise guide to UML models was written for software engineers interested in using UML models immediately. Focusing on a select group of tools and techniques, this practical guide takes you from use cases to code. However, only the final chapter is dedicated to actually writing code.

Applied Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: An Annotated e-Commerce Example provides a practical, hands-on guide to putting use case methods to work in real-world situations. This companion workbook to Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML bridges the gap between the theory presented in the authors' first book, and the practical issues involved in the development of an internet/e-commerce application.

Uniquely conceived as a workbook, featuring an e-commerce system for an on-line bookstore as a running example, the book dissects its design in detail, demonstrates the most common design mistakes, and reveals the correct solutions. The hands-on exercises give you the opportunity to detect, identify, and correct critical errors on your own, before reviewing the solutions provided in the book.

The workbook is structured around the proven ICONIX Process, a streamlined approach to UML modeling designed to avoid analysis paralysis without skipping analysis and design. It presents the four key phases of this minimalist approach to use case driven design: domain modeling; use case modeling; robustness analysis; and sequence diagramming. For each of these topics, the book provides an overview, detailed discussion, top 10 mistakes, and a set of exercises for honing object modeling and design skills.

Another unique aspect of this book is the three chapters on reviews. The authors devote a chapter each to requirements review; preliminary design review; and critical design review. This focus on "designing quality in" by teaching how to review UML models fills a major gap in the published literature.

The book shows you, by example, how to avoid more than 70specific design errors as shown in the "Top 10" error lists on the inside covers and within each chapter. With the information, examples, and exercises in this book, you will develop the knowledge and skills you need to apply use case modeling more effectively to your next application.

Electronic Review of Books - Gregory V. Wilson

Bingo! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner -- Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML, by Doug Rosenberg (with Kendall Scott) has more hot buzzwords in its title than anything that's come across my desk in a long time. It is also a readable, informative, and practical guide to using UML, and will probably replace Fowler's UML Distilled on my recommended reading list.

UML (short for the "Unified Modeling Language") is an everything-for-everyone collection of graphical notations for object-oriented analysis and design. It includes use cases, class hierarchies, state charts, sequence diagrams, and just about everything else that its authoring committee thought might be useful. Most CASE tool vendors have already shipped UML-aware versions of their tools, and many recent books on Java, design patterns, and business reengineering have adopted it for diagramming.

All of which would be good news, except for two things: UML's breadth makes it hard to navigate, and it still leaves an uncomfortably wide gulf between the analysis ("what") and design ("how") phases of a project. The principal value of this book is that it tackles both of these issues head-on. In just eight chapters, Rosenberg (who is the founder and president of ICONIX) presents a slimmed-down core of UML, organized around a four-stage design process. Each stage has clearly defined steps, and concrete milestones that specify what ought to be produced (that is, how to tell when you're finished).

UML's second weakness is addressed by one new bit of notation, which Rosenberg calls a "robustness diagram." While the connection between the general idea of robustness and these diagrams seems a bit tenuous to me, they appear to be a useful bridge between use cases on the one hand, and implementation-oriented diagrams on the other. Their value becomes clear during the development of the book's running example, a simple stock-trading system.

I have only two criticisms of this book. The first is that Rosenberg repeatedly refers to, and discusses, both older design notations and debates about the finer points of UML -- in fact, he devotes an entire appendix to the difference between "uses" and "extends," despite the fact that he clearly doesn't think the difference is significant. This material might be of interest to the cognoscenti, but is out of place in a book aimed at newcomers.

The second criticism of this book is one that I thought I'd never make: It is simply too short. Having finally found a useful, readable, and practical description of a design-centered development methodology, I really wanted a dozen or more examples of each point to work through. If the authors were to produce a companion workbook, I can promise them that they'd have at least one buyer...

Doug Rosenberg, of ICONIX Software Engineering, Inc., has been providing system development tools and training for nearly two decades, with particular emphasis on object-oriented methods. He developed a Unified Booch/Rumbaugh/Jacobson design method in 1993 that preceded Rational's UML by several years. He has produced over a dozen multimedia training courses on object technology, including COMPREHENSIVE COM and COMPLETE CORBA, and is the author of several Addison-Wesley titles.

Kendall Scott is a UML trainer and consultant. With more than sixteen years of experience as a technical writer, he is skilled in converting complex, technical material into understandable and easy-to-use manuals.