Improving Object-Oriented Analysis with Roles

Object-oriented analysis (OOA) has been proposed and applied in software engineering for more than fifteen years. Many researchers and practitioners have published many articles and books to discuss this methodology. Many companies and organizations have also published many standards in software development. However, there is one critical problem that is becoming the bottle neck affecting the efficiency and correctness of OOA, i.e., the gap between customers, analysts and designers is too large to obtain a satisfactory requirement analysis report. Role-based analysis is one possible way to alleviate this symptom. It can at least improve the quality of the requirement analysis report. This paper gives a retrospect to the past OOA methodology, analyzes the weakness of it, proposes how to practice a new method for system analysis, i.e., role-based analysis, and demonstrates the benefits of this method.