Conditional Love

Let's consider some other amusing things we can do with class diagrams. With a little tape, some string, and a pair of scissors, we can of course convert most class diagrams into a ceremonial tribal mask or a pirate hat. Another fun thing we can do is derive attribute values using conditional expressions.

Let's return to our example of the Arms4Less online superstore. We're having lunch with our SME, Sarge, and he's just finished telling us a funny story about a coup he helped stage a few years back. "So Johnny turns to me and says, whadaya mean, where's the king? Who do we got tied up in the back of your car?" We laugh appreciatively, and then turn the conversation back to the requirements for the store. Sarge explains how they want to offer various sales incentives, "like 20% off for quantities over 50". We can easily modify our model to reflect this requirement, by adding a new derived attribute called discount to OrderItem, and then modifying the derivation expression on total to reflect any discounting to be applied. We must also add the necessary non-derived attributes, discountQty and discount, to the Product, as shown.

Hopefully, you are beginning to see how much more you could be getting out of your class diagrams if you would just spend a little more time drawing pictures and a little less time writing code. I know how that can be tough with all the pressure you're getting from religious eXtremists, but as we shall soon see, Precision Requirements Modeling fits very nicely into an Agile approach that even the religious right can love.

In our next installment we'll really get this party started when we consider how to derive values from query expressions. I know the anticipation will be killing you between now and then, and I'd love to show you right now, but I gotta go write some code.