Properties of Relationships among objects in Object-Oriented Software Design

TL;DR

This paper reviews and categorizes the properties of object relationships in object-oriented design, providing taxonomies based on various perspectives and evaluating them through a case study.

Contribution

It introduces five comprehensive taxonomies for relationship properties in object-oriented design, enhancing understanding and analysis of object relationships.

Findings

Five taxonomies for relationship properties are proposed.

Relationships are evaluated through a detailed case study.

Recommendations for designing object relationships are provided.

Abstract

One of the modern paradigms to develop a system is object oriented analysis and design. In this paradigm, there are several objects and each object plays some specific roles. After identifying objects, the various relationships among objects must be identified. This paper makes a literature review over relationships among objects. Mainly, the relationships are three basic types, including generalization/specialization, aggregation and association.This paper presents five taxonomies for properties of the relationships. The first taxonomy is based on temporal view. The second taxonomy is based on structure and the third one relies on behavioral. The fourth taxonomy is specified on mathematical view and fifth one related to the interface. Additionally, the properties of the relationships are evaluated in a case study and several recommendations are proposed.