Interface Analysis - realisation
What
System Interface Analysis
How
The dish
Refinement of the System Interface Description
Ingredients
- Class diagram
- Sequence diagrams
- Communication diagrams
Process
When you have decided which parts of the system-to-be you will work on for the current iteration you can refine the description of the interfaces for the external systems communicating with these parts. Here is a list of examples of things to consider:
- If for instance you are communicating through a relational database you may have to construct a more detailed model of the database: specifying columns, datatypes, foreign keys etc.
- If you have decided that the system-to-be will connect to some server on the Internet you have to uncover the details of the protocol to use. A Sequence Diagram is a good tool to illustrate the dialogue with another system.
- If you are sharing a resource with another system you have to address potential concurrency problems in order to avoid race conditions.
Why
You have to be very precise and thorough when you uncover the details for the system interfaces of external systems. Let us say you have decided that the system-to-be should communicate with an external system through a serial connection and you did not specify all the details for the protocol to use. In this case you are not completely sure what the external system can do for you and how you can ask the external system to do it. In this case it is almost certain that you will face problems with the people responsible for the external system. Putting work in specifying details of interfaces will save you a lot of work in the long run, because it will help you clarify who is responsible for what.
The final analysis is Dimensioning.
