Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations

Chapter 7. Describing Collaborations

Francis Galton, a 19th century geneticist, remarked, “It often happens that after being hard at work, and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them ... I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them.” We, too, experience a shift when we move from informal CRC card modeling to more formal descriptions of collaborations and interaction sequences. Sometimes we need to paint a broad picture of collaborators; at other times we need to offer quite exact explanations. When our models get more detailed, we must change our level of ...