Today I got up the drawings for OO analysis. These drawings are pretty complete in themselves but if this were a real environment there would be an interaction diagram for each of the use cases. I only have one use case represented. This is why I think that it would be impossible to answer this question correctly in the 3 hour time limit. 3 hours is enough time to maybe get the domain model and part of the class model but to get all of the interaction diagrams no way. Even if you just did one for the high level domain model it would be tough. For the question if you went that route that would mean that there would be a great deal of overlap in the work products of the analysis. So the test question would not be a real world situation. How can you ask this question and get what you really want to know from the student? Do they really know how to do analysis or can they just do some nifty figures? Because, in the real world not all the diagrams are done by the same guy. Sometimes the class diagram is not even done by the guy doing the high level analysis. But, granted in some instance all the diagrams and use cases are done by the same guy. This kind of goes back to the architecture question and how do you do architectural analysis. So these questions kind of contradict each other. Ask everyone or ask no one....well what is it going to be? Do it yourself or get multiple people to do it because it is a big job..mmm...what`s it going to be. The test questions are not clear. What are they really trying to find out? I thought this question was to find out if you knew something about analysis. It looks like they are asking can you diagram in different notation. This is the same kind of mistake as on the architecture question where it looks like they are asking what are the two kinds or architectural analysis where one of the answers is actually 2 because it involves asking who you are questioning. It seems to me that it sound like they want a memorized answer and not knowledge of the question. Two times in different exams the question writer has ask questions that they really have never done and don`t really know much about. They have the flavor of the answer but not the real answer. I will give them what they want. I see that they are trying to be concrete and specific but in doing so they have been gray and misdirected. Why do I have to figure out what they want?
I have yet to answer part C yet of the Software Analysis question. I will have to get to that tomorrow. I want to add references also. I think that it is important to all that read the answers.