A Pattern Language for Class Responsibility Assignment for Business Applications

초록

Assigning class responsibility is a design decision to be made early in the design phase in software development, which bridges requirements and an analysis model. In general, assigning class responsibility relies heavily on the expertise and experience of the developer, and it is often ad-hoc. Class responsibility assignment rules are hard to be uniformly defined across the various domains of systems. Thus, the existing work describes general stepwise guidelines without concrete methods, which imposes the limit in deriving an analysis model from requirements specification without any loss of information and providing sufficient quality of the analysis model. This study tried to grasp the commonality and variations in analyzing the business application domain. By narrowing the subject of the solution, the presented patterns can help identify and assign class responsibilities for a system belonging to the business application domain. The presented pattern language consists of six segmented patterns, including 19 variations of relationship type among conceptual classes. Each sequence of a use case specification could be analyzed as the result of weaving a set of the six segmented patterns. A case study with a payroll system is presented to prove the patterns’ feasibility, explaining how the proposed patterns can develop an analysis model. The coverage of the proposing CRA patterns and enhancement of implementation code quality is discussed as the benefit. © 2021

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