Sunday, September 19, 2004

BorCon : Advanced Domain Modeling

In 1999, Peter Coad introduced the concept of using colors to signify archetypal behavior for UML classes in a domain (or business) model [Coad 1999]. He went further and suggested that the colored archetypal classes typically formed a pattern which he dubbed the Domain Neutral Component (DNC). Color modeling was the culmination of over a decade of work in object-oriented theory for Peter Coad. Throughout those years, he had been seeking methods to enable the building of  “frequent, tangible, working results”. Modeling and its derivative – code re-use – were at the heart of his attempt to create a truly agile method for software engineering This paper will present some of the history of domain modeling in color and the DNC with a brief explanation of its origins and effectiveness. A five year update on the technique will follow. It will show that the DNC provides a strong and robust architecture which withstands change with minimal refactoring and minimal regression effect across the rest of the model. This is the essence of enabling agility with object-oriented functional architecture – a fast, reliable, elegant modeling technique which maps directly to implementable code whilst gracefully accepting change even late in the development cycle.

[Download the full paper in PDF]
[Download the presentation slides in PDF]