An Object-Oriented Analysis and Design Environment

Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) are challenging activities and crucial to project success. The software engineer needs to understand the application, elicit requirements, and produce a design that fulfills the requirements. These are called the thinking process. Unfortunately, only a fraction of CS/SE curricula teach such a thinking process. Moreover, existing tools only support diagram drawing and diagram management, not the thinking process. As a consequence, few diagrams produced are useful for communication and construction of the working software. This paper presents an integrated development environment (IDE) supporting OOAD thinking process with manual, semi-automatic, and automatic modes. It guides students and software engineers HOW-TO perform OOAD, and lets them learn OOAD and related UML diagrams from using the IDE. Experiments and real-world projects show promising improvement of OOAD performances of students and software engineers.