Blogging Ottinger (tim)Topic Map v. Noun Verb
I’m not a fan of noun/verb analysis. Really. I think that it’s better than not doing anything, if only in the sense that it makes the time go faster. It gives something to work with, and you can try to do OOA from it, and you won’t always be totally messed up by doing so. It may not be the worse thing you can do.
But I tried drawing a kind of mind map from a problem statement today, and it strangely resembled the structure of the OOD that I use for the same problem. Not exactly, mind you, and there was plenty of interpretation to be done. It was also different (more literal) in one case but it was much closer than noun/verb would have been, and much better than most of the domain models I’ve seen for OOA.
I extended the basic mind map to go past a single central concept, and have facts about facts about facts, and to allow “choices” more explicitly. I’m afraid that I might be reinventing UML if I go any further.
It could be because I knew where I wanted to end up. Or maybe it modeled the problem initially. It didn’t know what would be an abstract class or a concrete class, and it didn’t pretend to. But it did show me some interesting aspects. Maybe an OOA model really is/should-be a kind of topic or concept map.
I’ll try this a little more. There may be something to it. I don’t know that I can recommend it professionally, but the idea is just interesting enough that it may matter at least a little.
