Dynamic Modelling - tutorial

Validating system requirements with executable specifications

Course contents:

Course benefits

Who should attend

Content

Duration

Course benefits:

IT practitioners are familiar with the use of modelling in system development. An entity-relationship diagram formalises how a system's data may be structured; a UML class diagram similarly describes the interfaces and relationships between collaborating objects. Both of these types of model are static: they focus on a system's structure rather than its behaviour over time.

Dynamic modelling is a technique for capturing how objects are expected to respond, individually or jointly, to events in the business environment. The model describes the possible states of an object and how events cause an object to change from one state from another.

A dynamic model has several advantages over its static counterpart:

• A dynamic model contains a richer description of the application domain and the system requirements. Hence a dynamic model can be used to generate a static model, but not vice versa.
• A dynamic model can also be executed like a program and thereby automatically serves as a functional prototype of the system. This provides a way for non-technical stakeholders to participate in the development and review of technical specifications.

Having completed this tutorial, you will be able to identify how dynamic modelling can contribute to validating requirements specifications within your system development process. The tutorial includes a demonstration of how a dynamic model can be run as a functional prototype of a system.

Who should attend:

Anyone involved in the specification and design of computer systems.

Content:

What is Dynamic Modelling? - Models in system development; static models and dynamic models; modelling the application domain versus modelling the requirement

The Dynamic Modelling Technique - Using a state transition diagram to describe an object's dynamic behaviour; events that are shared by different objects; event-driven transitions versus derived states; modelling complex behaviour by composing simple behaviour

Executing a Specification - Interpreting state transition diagrams as programs; building a prototype automatically from the model

Dynamic Modelling in the Development Lifecycle - Validating the requirements specification; models that bridge between specification and design; extracting a static model from a dynamic model

Duration:

Half day, in-house only.

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