Software Requirements Using the Unified Process: A Practical Approach

Chapter 11. Building a Class Diagram

To build a class diagram, we must form relationships between classes. The three major relationships we must represent are, from the strongest relationship to weakest, generalization, aggregation, and association.

Generalization

Generalization is often referred to as inheritance. This is likely the hardest concept for people unfamiliar with object-oriented technology to understand, but it is an important idea. Generalization is the ability to create some base class and then have a derived class inherit the attributes and behaviors. We can make an analogy to the classification system used in biology. In this analogy, ...