Improving Requirements Analysis in OO Software Development

Today, most of the Object-Oriented (OO) software development methodologies analyze requirements in terms of objects and their interactions. However, requirements are more naturally to be specified functionally. Our informal survey with the Chinese software engineers in this region also strongly reflects this. This paper proposes an enhanced data flow diagram (DFD) called data flow net (DF net) that resolves the impeding mismatch between DFD based models and OO models. And, it proposes an approach that uses DF net to specify and analyze use-cases functionally during the requirements analysis stage. In the design stage, it maps the resulting DF nets systematically and precisely into OO structure. The proposed approach avoids the need of making decisions on objects and their interactions during the requirement analysis stage.