- 1.1. Purpose and Scope
- 1.2. The System Development Process
- 1.3. Underlying Principles
- 1.4. What's in a Name?
- 1.5. Audience for and Structure of the Book
- 1.6. A Participative Case Study on the Web
- 1.7. A Caveat
1.6. A Participative Case Study on the Web
This book was to have included three case studies, and indeed we developed a third one, but we eventually decided not to include it. Instead, we offer it on the Web for the reasons discussed below.
While we were writing this book, software development went through some radical changes, most notably the adoption of object-oriented techniques, culminating in the integration of some of the most popular ones into the Unified Modeling Language (UML).
The third case study is of an automated airline quick-ticketing system (QTS) that is user-interface driven and very software-intensive. We consider the Web to be the right medium for this case study because the UML and other software notations are still changing, with new versions almost every year. Updating a book that frequently is not feasible.
The QTS model will demonstrate how our process of developing tightly linked architecture and requirements models can be used for software-intensive systems, and how to transition smoothly from our techniques at the system levels to the UML in software. Using the Web will allow you, the reader, to participate in the evolution of this and possibly other models as the system and software worlds change.
The Website is www.psare.com, and it includes a forum where those interested can discuss system and software issues, the methods, the QTS, and other systems and models as we develop them. We look forward to these virtual meetings with you, and we hope that this approach makes both the book and the third model more valuable to you.