UML Designer User's Guide


Going from requirements to analysis

The first phase in a "forward" development process, capturing requirements, yields elements such as requirements, use cases, things, and actors. Of these, things are most important from a transform perspective, because things represent domain objects (and potential implementation classes). By transforming things into protocols, you can move from requirements capture to analysis.

The Generate Protocol transform maps things to protocols and responsibilities to protocol message specifications. The default mapping of things to protocols is one-to-one: transforming a thing into a protocol results in the creation of a Protocol element that, by default, has the same name as the thing. For example, a thing called Car would result in a protocol called <Car>. You can rename the generated protocol while still maintaining its traceability link back to the original thing.

The default mapping of a responsibility of a thing depends upon the idiom of the responsibility; a responsibility and its participants will be mapped, according to its idiom, into one or more message specifications and parameters. In this way, you can go from the informality of responsibilities to the relative rigor of message specifications.

You can transform responsibilities collectively or one at a time. You can also modify the generated message specifications afterward.


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