We had our study group meeting on Sunday. It ran kind of long. During the first part of this week I felt like I didn`t accomplish much by being in the meeting this past week. We went over the 431 class notes on OCL. Yes, they are correct but it seems as if they would not help you answer the questions on the test. Granted I have not looked at all the slides but it seems as if they are too rudimentary to answer the PhD exam questions. You will have to go to the book and learn this stuff. I have taken a break from looking through the OCL material to concentrate on a fire drill to get my content ready for next weeks study group meeting. They wanted to have an intermediate meeting tonight at 7pm. I have gone through a quick look at the stuff required but it is very quick. I don`t know if they will have enough background to get into this stuff. The topic is on Structured Analysis v.s. OO Analysis. In past tests it was very difficult to get information on the topic of Structured Analysis. Every book I looked at on the reading list or not had only a few words on the subject. It was impossible to answer the question fully. I got a book from the late 70`s to answer the questions. I thought that it was very historical referring to the classical project lifecycle....otherwise known as the waterfall model. I found the information dated and it gave me a really bad taste in my mouth for the quality of the test. It was not that the test was asking about historical information but that the quality of the information to study for the test was not there. If I had ever been exposed to the topic it would have been easier. So the way I found to get around the problem of nothing on the net and no books to read was to get a used book off of Amazon. The book "Structured Analysis and System Specification" by Tom DeMarco helped. The book was published in 1978 by Yourdon press. Something prompted me to google for the "Yourdon Report". Say God told me or something. I think that I may have read it in the DeMarco book or something but it rattled around in my head for a long time before I went and looked for it. I got Yourdon`s blog page. The second entry on the page was about the Structured Design wiki he has and I found an online copy of a book "Just Enough Structure Analysis by Ed Yourdon". Funny how that happens. This is an update to Structured Analysis. He talks about the classical Structured Analysis and its problems. I am worried about the exam though. The question is written from the classical sense of the term Structured Analysis. I think I will mention the information about the "New" Structured Analysis and the "Old" structured analysis and then kind of give both views of part C of the question. Part C of the question on the study questions says, "Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and suggest an approach that might be suitable for decomposing extremely large systems." The question implies I think that one has an advantage over the other. I think Yourdon would say that the "New" Strucutred analysis would work for very large systems. I think that Grady Booch would say the "Old" structured analysis could not compare to OO analysis because of the complexity of today`s systems. I find this study stuff so baffling. It really depends on the information that you read and how you read into the question. This is really an unfair question. It really depends on the graders expertise. If the grader has a script there may be no way to pass the question unless you guess what the intended answer is....the classical answer when taking the test in the 90`s or the today answer when taking the test in `07. It really depends on your individual history and the history of the grader. The only thing constant is change.