Developing Applications with Java™ and UML

Identifying Attributes and Operations

Until now we haven't paid much attention to attributes or operations. In this section we see how to identify both.

Attributes

We have already encountered several attributes, particularly during the class identification exercise. Recall that we identified many nouns that were actually attributes (rather than classes) because they didn't have structure and behavior in their own right but merely served as structural components of something else.

In the case of Remulak Productions, nouns such as first name, name, and last name are part of the Customer class. Attributes such as address line 1, address line 2, address line 3, city, state, postal code, and country are part of the Address class, whereas attributes ...