Week 14 (starting 14 Jan 2008)

We have looked into use case analysis this week. This is to analyze the details of the use cases by :

1. Identifying the analysis objects - i.e. to identify the boundary, controller and entity objects.
2. Assigning the responsibilities to these objects - i.e. to derive from the use case description the tasks that each of the analysis objects need to do and assign to them these tasks

There are 3 types of analysis objects :

1. Boundary objects - these are usually the user interfaces (eg online forms, menu options..etc). The purpose of the boundary objects is to allow users to submit the requests for the sysetm to process.
2. Controller objects - these are the intelligent objects that contain the business processing logic. The purpose of the controller objects is to co-ordinate how to process the request submitted.
3. Entity objects - these are the objects that store information. The purpose of the entity objects is to provide information when processing the request.

When analyzing a use case, we will

1. use ONE boundary object to represent the user interfaces and interfaces to external system
2. use ONE controller object to co-ordinate the steps of processing the request
3. use AS MANY AS NEEDED entity objects to store the different types of information
4. use sequence diagram to present the details of the responsibilities assigned

Consider the Trigger download of Student and Module information use case from the Student Attendance System case study.

• The system administrator will submit the download request of student and module information from EIS. Once the information is downloaded, they will be stored respectively in the Student and Module objects.
• In this case, there are 2 boundary objects : one (DownloadForm) to submit the download request and the other (IEIS) is to interface to the external system EIS.

The sequence diagram for the analysis is shown below.

What are the responsibilities assigned to the DownloadForm object?

With this, we end all the topics to be covered in this module. Next week, we will do revision.