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Object-Oriented Analysis methods, abbreviated by OOA
methods, are methodologies following the software engineering
principles to develop object-oriented software programs by using
of object-oriented developing technology, and they have become
popular methods in the software developer group recently.
However, to identify objects and classes in an OOA method will
need much domain-specific knowledge and many OO developing
experiences. Experts or experienced developers always have
heuristic solutions with different identification knowledge to
different problems. It is difficult to understand the heuristics
for novice developers that are not acquainted with special
domain or OO developing paradigm. We propose a method that
builds an expert system with the identification knowledge to
support system developers to obtain their desired OO software
programs. Objects and classes are the most important elements of
an OO developing system. The expert system provides objects and
classes which are suitable for one special domain problem to the
developers, and then this information can provide the developers
to model the system easily and complete the rest of development
work quickly. Our expert system consists of the
identification knowledge with the explanations from experts in a
knowledge base properly. It requires intensive efforts of the
acquisition work by the knowledge engineer. Nevertheless, with
this approach, we do not only improve the ability to produce
quality OO programs, but also can reduce the development effort.
Furthermore, studying the knowledge and experiences can further
explain the reasons about identification problem. This useful
information helps us to understand more about the activities of
analyst*s thinking.
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