How to design the right object classes?

Since the birth of object oriented languages and object oriented design tools, an essential question has never been completely answered: how to find out the objects? Roughly speaking, “finding the objects” means defining the right objects, the most useful ones, those which really fit the effective needs. All the users of Merise will agree with the fully justified question since they often have to solve such a problem: how to find the right entities? Most of object oriented design methods, suggest a “Merisian” solution to this problem: let´s basically consider the equality “object=entity” and then we are back on the previous problem (without having solved anything). The project COD (class object definition) presents three solutions (specialization, normalization, generalization) for building up the object classes of any problem, and shows that they are complementary. For each solution, COD also provides an additional step allowing to link several parallel designed schemas. Resulting classes of each designer are considered as “views” and final classes are built up by using a merging process