Object Oriented Software Development:
Object-Oriented Analysis

What is Object-Oriented Analysis (OOA)?

Almost any experienced software developer will tell you that you need to know what you want your software to do long before you begin to worry about how you are going to make your software do whatever it is supposed to do. This leads naturally to asking what the "behavior" of the software is supposed to be, and pushes developers to talk to the end users before proceeding too far and making too many assumptions it will be difficult to back away from.

This viewpoint, in turn, also naturally, encourages a developer to think of pieces of software as "things" that "behave" in certain ways and have certain "properties", just like real "objects" in the "real world". At the risk of oversimplification, then, one might say that an object-oriented analysis of a problem would be one that attempted to view the problem as a collection of objects, each with its own behavior and properties, and with all objects "communicating" with one another in whatever ways are necessary to accomplish the task at hand.

Use Cases (for discovering system use)

• A use case describes some particular interaction between a (not necessarily human) user of a system and that system, from the user's point of view. So, use cases are the basis of behavior-driven analysis of a system.
• The requirements of a system are the features that the system must have to solve a given problem, and one way of discovering those requirements is through a use case analysis.
• Use case analysis is the process of discovering use cases through the creation and development of "stories" and "scenarios" that involve existing or potential users of the system.
• Use case analysis is an iterative process, and involves the following steps:
  • Identifying the "actors" (participants)
  • Creating a preliminary list of use cases
  • Refining and naming the use cases
  • Determining each use case's sequence of steps
  • Modeling each use case (perhaps with a UML diagram and using a modeling tool like Microsoft's Visio, or something more heavy duty like Rational Rose from Rational Software)

Question:
What use cases can you identify (and describe) for the game of Mastermind?

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