CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki3 10 pz

CRC Card

Introduction

CRC (Class-Responsibility-Collaborator) Card is a simple yet powerful object-oriented analysis technique served as a brainstorming tool. Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham first introduced CRC cards at OOPSLA 1989 in their paper “A Laboratory for Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking”. The original purpose of CRC Card was to teach the object-oriented programming at Tektronix.

A sample of CRC card

The CRC Card is composed of three components: Class; Responsibity; Collaborator.

Class

A Class represents a collection of similar objects. Objects are things of interest in the system being modeled. They can be a person, place, thing, or any other concept important to the system at hand. The Class name appears across the top of the CRC card.

Responsibility

A Responsibility is anything that the class knows or does. These responsibilities are things that the class has knowledge about itself, or things the class can do with the knowledge it has.

Collaborator

A Collaborator is another class that is used to get information for, or perform actions for the class at hand. It often works with a particular class to complete a step (or steps) in a scenario. The Collaborators of a class appear along the right side of the CRC card.

Examples

A simple CRC card example: floor plan

Here is a simple example of CRC Card to illustrate the concept of CRC Card.

Now, we consider a floor plan of a house. The floor plan is an overview of the house, it has several properties, such as the name of the floor plan, the plan positioning, the locations of all kinds of stuff. Before moved in, the house only contains some basic elements: door, window, wall, roof, security camera. The floor plan should collaborates with all of these elements, and all of these elements have their only property design, such as the style of door, the color of walls, the shape of roof, the brand and resolution of security camera, etc. However, the positioning of these elements should be defined in the floor plan. So, there are many properties in floor plan and it also has to collaborate with other elements. To illustrate the above relationships, we could use CRC Card, the sample of this simple example is posted aside.

Here is a complicated example of CRC Card to further illustrate the concept of CRC Card.

The crc card of class: address book

We think a more complicated example: Address Book. To construct a full functional address book, we need many complicated part, such as person, address book, controller, graphic user interface, file system. It's not like the previous example that only the floor plan incorporates all other elements. In this example the elements are all inter reactive. The person class should contain basic properties and serves as data base to the whole structure. The properties of a person in address book contain: individual's first name, individual's last name, individual's address, individual's city, the individual's state, individual's ZIP, individual's phone number, etc. There will be many instances of person in the address book, so we need address book class to manage so many entries. And the address book class should also respond to the requests of other classes. So, the properties in address book class would be: Get number of a person, Print entries, Get other person information, Add person and related properties, Get full name of a person, Update person, Remove person, etc. All these operations are directly related to the person class.

Object Think

Introduction

Object Think is first introduced by Peter Coad and Jill Nicola in the book “Object-oriented Programming” published in 1993. It is an approach to Object-oriented Programming that is based on the practice of object personification. Object Think requires developers to adopt a radically different way of thinking and tends to result in fewer objects and its primary objective is an accurate domain model made of composable objects that communicate with each other.