I am currently thinking about what deliverables to request from the students in a new software engineering / software development project. Although the project will involve a significant implementation part, the software engineering part is crucial. To ensure that the students design and model their software system well, I would request the students to model their system to be developed using a variety of notations such as :
During the requirements phase :
• An *activity diagram* to provide a high-level view of the behavior and flow of the software system to be developed.
• Either *use cases* or *user stories* to capture the different usage scenarios that the system should be able to handle.
During the analysis phase :
• A conceptual UML *class diagram* for describing the main concepts of the system to be developed.
• Either an *ORM* (Object Role Modeling) or *ER* (Entity Relationship) diagram to describe the data that the system will need to handle.
During the design phase :
• A detailed UML *class diagram* for describing the static structure of the system in terms of classes and operations.
• UML *sequence diagrams* for describing the dynamic behavior of the system.
• A *relational schema* of the database that the system will be using.
Of course apart from the above many other kinds of diagrams exist such as goal diagrams, feature diagrams, agent models, state machine diagrams, formal specification schemas, object diagrams, deployment diagrams, package diagrams, component diagrams, architectural models, interaction diagrams, message sequence charts, design patterns, and many more.
In your opinion, what kind of diagrams should or could be part of such a project and which diagrams are less important?
Project Development life cycle starts from system requirement specification , the analysis , design , .....etc until we reach testing and system delivery , for each phase of system development UML provides a diagram to support those phases
Of course we will cover the different life cycle phases (see my question), regardless of whether a waterfall process is followed or not, but the question was what models should in your opinion certainly be required to use in a university-level software engineering project and which models or diagrams are less crucial and could be dropped or left to the appreciation of the students?
In my class, students design and model their software system using:
- For requirements: Activity diagrams and use case diagramas with a good specification of each use case. (Name, Precondition, Normal Sequence, exceptions, postcondition).
During this phase, we also ask them the software prototype, the UI at least, because they can understand better the user's needs.
- For analysis and design: Class diagram and Sequence diagram.
In my experience, ask them to model without prototyping is too dificult for them.
Sorry in advance, this is just a partial answer: Regarding activity diagrams - if not modeling business processes - I think they should be used during design to model control flow. I don't think this is a requirements activity. If they model the process in which the future system shall be used (w/o modeling that system itself), I think they are appropriate for discussing requirements.
I like to also discuss/ask for Deployment Diagrams.
In modern day IT systems this can convey very important information about what sw is running where.
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