Discovering Classes

A cookbook for finding classes does not exist. As Grady Booch has been known to say, “This is hard!” The Rational Unified Process advocates finding the classes for a system under development by looking for boundary, control, and entity classes. These three stereotypes conform to a “model-view-controller” point of view and allow the analyst to partition the system by separating the view from the domain from the control needed by the system.

Since the analysis and design process is iterative, the list of classes will change as time moves on. The initial set of classes probably will not be the set of classes that eventually gets implemented. Thus, the term candidate class is often used to describe the first set of classes found ...

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