An experience of using FDOOA method to develop a telecommunications network management system

Most OOA methods ignore the importance of system functions that are the focus of users, and require an extra effort to remove the redundant classes introduced in identifying candidate classes from the nouns and verbs of problem description. To remedy these drawbacks, we propose the FDOOA (Functional-Decomposition OOA) method. The system function model is introduced; the class model is constructed through a parallel decomposition of function and data and bottom-up composition to formulate a class hierarchy. We also design an executable specification language AOORPL and a supporting environment to construct the rapid prototype automatically so that the user can validate the specification visually. To evaluate feasibility of the FDOOA method on large-scale software systems, we use a telecommunications network management system as example to define its system specification. This system includes 44 services in total, and its system specification has 112 system functions/subfunctions and 183 classes. After this evaluation, we indeed demonstrate the advantage of facilitating the communication with the users, reducing redundant classes, decreasing the cost of modifications, and simplifying the verification of requirement specifications