Project Plan for the Semester

In the first three projects, you will analyze, design, model, and implement a generic database of PC, personal computing devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The database will include PCs' major hardware and software components that are preinstalled or can be installed.

The main goal is to construct a clear, high-level, conceptual model of PCs and their components by means of effective inheritance and whole-part hierarchies together with pertinent association relations. Once such a model is built, specific components should be derivable by suitable inheritance. The projects will therefore model relatively significant hardware/software components to reasonable levels of the specialization (inheritance) hierarchy, but will not seek to include all components of actual PCs.

Project 1 Description

In Project 1, you are to establish a generalization-specialization (inheritance) hierarchy of the following objects:

products, both hardware and software; this will be the most general, root class of the hierarchy.

hardware products

PCs: desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones

hardware components of PCs

processors: CPUs, GPUs

memories and storages: volatile, non-volatile

software products: operating systems, browsers, applications

Each product object represents a productmodel, not an individual hardware/software item with a serial number.

In addition, create a separate class of companies (which make products). This class will be isolated in the Project 1 model.

Include appropriate attributes in classes.

Relations (association and whole-part) will be established in project 2, and should not be included in this project.

Your model will be graded mainly on the soundness/effectiveness of the inheritance hierarchy, and secondarily on the quality of class attributes.

Here is a summary of key points:

All the classes and inheritance hierarchies must be modeled in UML class diagrams.

Include basic, essential attributes in classes. Attribute data types may be specified or omitted in this project.

Key attributes, if any, should be specified by appending(key)to the attribute names. For example, if the company class has a key attributecompanyName, put "companyName (key)" in the class box.

The intuitive semantics of class attributes should be concisely described by English comments in the text documentation area, unless their names are self-explanatory. Your UML tool should provide text documentation areas for this purpose.

Use the following standard UML identifiers convention:

Class names should begin with uppercase letters; if a class name is a noun, it should be in singular form.

Relation names, class attributes, and function names should begin with lowercase letters.

The projects must be completed by a UML tool. If you've never used a UML tool,Visual Paradigm UML free community editionis recommended.