Why Do Analysis and Design?

When it comes down to it, the real point of software development is cutting code. Diagrams are, after all, just pretty pictures. No user is going to thank you for pretty pictures; what a user wants is software that executes.

So when you are considering using the UML, it is important to ask yourself why you are doing it and how it will help you when it comes down to writing the code. There's no proper empirical evidence to prove that these techniques are good or bad, but the following subsections discuss the reasons that I often come across for using them.

In this section, I talk a little about techniques that I'll discuss later. If you find these forward references confusing, just skip this section and come back to ...

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