Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013

Chapter 15Top-Down Design with Use Case, Activity, Sequence, Component, and Class Diagrams

What's in this chapter?

• Creating and using use case and activity diagrams
• Creating and using sequence and component diagrams
• Generating code from a class diagram

Wrox.com Code Download for this Chapter

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/proalm3ed on the Download Code tab. The files are in the Chapter 15 download folder and individually named as shown throughout this chapter.

Chapter 14 introduced you to architecture and modeling in the software space, and hinted at all the architectural goodness available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2013. This chapter dives deeper into several aspects of that, looking at use case, activity, sequence, component, and class diagrams.

One advantage of modeling tools is that they enable you to design the architecture of the application. Part of that design process is defining common terms around the problem domain, and then ensuring that everyone on the team understands those concepts. Using the use case, activity, and sequence diagrams, you can model your application, while ensuring that everyone on the team understands exactly what is being built.

This chapter is divided into five main sections:

• Use case diagrams
• Activity diagrams
• Sequence diagrams
• Component diagrams
• Class diagrams

Each section begins with a walk-through of how to build a diagram, as well as a diagram explanation. After that, the discussion looks ...