A Student Guide to Object-Oriented Development

7

State Diagrams

Learning outcomes

The material and exercises in this chapter will enable you to:

•. Explain the role and purpose of state diagrams in object-oriented systems development

•. Use a state diagram to identify how a class behaves in response to events

•. Draw a simple state diagram.

Key words that you will find in the glossary:

• action

• event

• state

• transition

• activity

• guard

• superstate

Introduction

So far, we have looked at how to model the organization and structure of data in the system using a class diagram, and at how to model a series of interactions between objects using sequence and collaboration diagrams. In this chapter we examine the system from a different point of view: how a class is affected by the different ...