Comprehensive Description and Critical Analysis of Object-Oriented Software Development

Abstract

Object-orientation and the object model underlie a simple, intuitive, and useful approach to software development that has great potential for significantly improving the software development process. Object-orientation unifies activities, such as analysis and design, that currently largely independent and somehwat incompatible. Despite its simplicity, a sroud of msytery surrounds this approach. The difficult often encountered when learning and understanding object-oriented methods sems partly from the capricious and improper use of object-oriented jargon in conversation and in the literature. This paper explores the foundations of the object model, defines the associated terminology in concrete terms, and gives an overview of various object-oriented methods as they relate to the software lifecycle.