Bridging the gap between structured requirements and object-oriented analysis and design

A very large part of the business world today still uses a traditional structured approach to requirements gathering. On the technology side, extensive development has been done in the area of object-oriented technologies that provides for productivity and quality through reusability, encourages team work and adopts a modular approach. Since the quality of the object-oriented applications has proven to be superior to the structured applications, especially in the area of maintenance, there has been a large demand for object-oriented applications. This leads to the situation where the requirements are structured, and the application needs to be object-oriented subject matter experts (SMEs), with their knowledge of the system modeled and analysts, with their knowledge of the object-oriented paradigm, need to work together and reorganize the information from the requirements analysis. This paper proposes and develops a methodology for the transition. Emphasis is placed on presenting the knowledge captured in the requirements specification. The proposed methodology extends the existing Classes-Responsibilities-Collaborators (CRC) method and is tailored to be simple and understandable to SMEs, requiring minimal amount of training, yet powerful enough to enable the participants to think through the model in an object-oriented fashion.