How the fuzziness of the real-world limits reuse by inheritance between business objects

Abstract

Will the OO paradigm resolve the problems of information systems analysts? In particular, will reuse by inheritance and polymorphism within a class hierarchy of business objects prove to be a powerful labour-and-code-saving device?

OO technologies do help designers working in the technology-bound external and internal layers of an information system, but OO principles do not provide systems analysts with the ‘leap forward’ that people have hoped for in the business requirements layer.

This paper explains why this is so, and provides a plan for shaping information system analysis so as to separate out the business requirements layer from the technology layers where OO is more helpful.