Name: Shilpashree Srinivasamurthy
Subject: ACS 560- Software Engineering
Term: Fall 2010
Chapter 6: Overview of COMET
Textbook: Designing Concurrent, Distributed, and Real-Time Applications with
UML
This chapter describes the COMET object-oriented software life cycle for the
development of concurrent applications, in particular, distributed and real time
applications.
The first section of the chapter describes the various phases of the COMET ObjectOriented Software Life Cycle. COMET object-oriented software life cycle is a highly
iterative software development process based around the use case concept. The various
phases of the COMET life cycle are as follows:
- Requirements Modeling: During this phase, a requirements model is developed
in which the functional requirements of the system are defined in terms of actors
and use cases.
- Analysis Modeling: In the analysis modeling phase, static and dynamic models
of the system are developed. The static model defines the structural relationships
among the problem domain classes. In the dynamic model which is later
developed, the use cases from the requirements model are refined to show the
objects that participate in each use case and how they interact with each other.
- Design Modeling: In this phase, the software architecture of the system is
designed, in which the analysis model is mapped to an operational environment.
- Incremental Software Construction: This approach is based on selecting a
subset of the system to be constructed for each increment. Incremental software
construction consists of the detailed design, coding and unit testing of the classes
in the subset. This is a phased approach by which the software is gradually
constructed and integrated until the whole system is built.
- Incremental Software Integration: During this phase, the integration testing of
each software increment is performed. The integration test for the increment is
based on the use cases selected for the increment.
- System Testing: System testing includes the functional testing of the systemnamely, testing the system against its functional requirements. This testing is
black box testing and is based on the black box use cases.
The next section briefly compares the COMET life cycle with the Unified Software
Development Process (USDP) and the Spiral Model
- Comparison of COMET with USDP: Each phase of the COMET life cycle
corresponds to a workflow of the USDP. The first three phases of the COMET
-
have the same names as the first three workflows of the USDP. The COMET
incremental software construction activity corresponds to the USDP
implementation workflow. The incremental software integration and the system
test phases of COMET map to the Test workflow of the USDP.
Comparison of COMET with Spiral Model: The COMET method can be used
with the spiral model. During the project planning for a given cycle of the spiral
model, the project manager decides what specific technical activity should be
performed from the Product Development quadrant. The selected technical
activity such as Requirements Modeling, Analysis Modeling or Design Modeling
is performed in that quadrant. The Risk analysis activities, performed in the
second quadrant, and the cycle planning, performed in the fourth quadrant,
determine how many iterations are required through each of the technical
activities.
The chapter then describes explains the main activities of the COMET and concludes
with a description of the steps in using COMET.