Technical Library

 

As well as our periodic journal ObjectiveView, Ratio publishes a range of material that is useful to the Software Development community. The vast majority of the whitepapers below have been published in industry magazines or at industry conferences.
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Agile Software Development and Project Management

 

W10 - A Tale of Two Projects – PDF - HTML
W12 – Planning to be Agile - PDF - HTML

Articles discussing the application and planning of agile, iterative and incremental software development projects. These articles contain a strong focus on risk management and project planning issues. These articles were originally published in a column in the UK software development magazine – Application Development Advisor. W12 has also been published in the DSDM newsletter.

 

 

 

 

Software Architecture and Design - Structure, Packaging, Modularity and Components

 

W9 - A Reference Architecture for Object and Component Based Systems  - PDF - HTML
W13 - ARM Yourself for Enterprise Application Development  - PDF - HTML
W4 - Objects and Components in a Financial system PDF - HTML
W7 - Component Based Development and Advanced OO Design – PDF - HTML

A collection of papers relating to software architecture and large scale application design and structure. These papers are all based, in one way or another on the Architectural Reference Model (ARM) for large scale applications.

 

W13 is the most up to date, then W9 – both papers discuss the ARM and its associated rules, but from different angles. W4  is a case study of applying the ARM in a financial system development. W7 discusses some design principles (CCP, CRP, etc.) and how they can be used to assist in decomposing large applications.  W13 was originally published in Enterprise Architect magazine, and Presented at Enterprise Architect conference, Barcelona – 2005. W9 was first published in Addison Wesley’s Extreme Programming Examined, and has also been presented at Component Developer's and User's Forum 2001 - Frankfurt, Germany, at OOIS 2000 - London, England, at Component Computing 2000 - Helsinki, Finland, and at XP2000 - Sardinia, Italy

 

 

 

Object Oriented Analysis and Design Using UML

 

W1 - Object Oriented Analysis and Design using UML – PDF - HTML
 

A “Cetus Link of the Week”, this article introduces UML and describes how it can be used as part of a logical analysis and design process. It was originally published in .Exe magazine in the UK, and has been linked to by many universities and companies.

 

It was presentated at IonaWorld 1999 in Dublin, and at the association of C/C++ Users Conference 1999 in Oxford, England.

 

 

 

 

 

Use Case Analysis

 

W3 - The RSI Approach to Use Case Analysis - PDF – HTML

W5a - RSI Use Cases - Long Paper – PDF – HTML

W5b - RSI Use Cases - Long Paper – Supplement – PDF – HTML

W8 -  Multi System Use Case Analysis – PDF - HTML

 

These papers describe and give worked examples of the RSI approach to use case analysis. In essence, the RSI approach tells you how to move from business processes to a system specification.

 

The RSI approach has been particularly adopted by the software testing community – and was published in Elfreide Dustin’s excellent book Quality Web System (Addison Wesley) – Chapter 2 of which is linked to here.

 

 

Miscellaneous

 

W6 - Persistence - Objects over Relational Databases – PDF - HTML

A financial application case study of the issues involved in mapping an objects to relational databases.

 

Panel Discussion - What is Software Architecture?

Notes from a panel session at TOOLS Europe 2000 chaired by Ratio’s Mark Collins-Cope – on what is Software Architecture.

 

W11 - C# - An Overview – PDF - HTML

 

An introductory article on the C# programming language. Also published in the ACCU Journal.