Applying Thing-Oriented Modeling and Patterns

Abstract

A great deal of difficulty in the task of developing software can be traced to the initial phase of its life cycle, when requirements are analyzed and design schemata are constructed. The process involves modeling that part of reality the software system is intended to address. The problem is that some 2014 studies have shown that more than a third of IT projects are cancelled before being completed, the costs of more than half of these projects will be higher than their original estimates, and, on average, barely more than one in six software projects are ever completed on-time and on-budget. The main reasons for these problems include lack of user input and incomplete requirements and specifications. Accordingly, even though previous decades have witnessed a great deal of progress in the area of software development, these difficulties point to the fact that such advancement has not furnished new paradigms that might further advance development in this field. This paper is a contribution in this direction in the area of requirements analysis and design. The paper proposes adopting a new modeling method for use in the software development phase of requirements analysis and design that can contribute to alleviating the problems of lack of user input and incomplete requirements specifications. The basic idea in the proposed method, called Thing-Oriented (TO) modeling, bases requirements analysis and design on “things” that flow. Without loss of generality, TO modeling is contrasted with Object-Oriented modeling. The results point to the feasibility of using TO modeling as a multilevel diagrammatic language with a constrained number of notions.