Chapter 3: ICONIX Process—A Core UML Subset

Overview

In this chapter, we provide an overview of ICONIX Process, a minimal object modeling process that is well suited to agile development. This overview should give you enough information to get started using the modeling techniques in your own project. For an in-depth description of ICONIX Process, see Doug’s previous two books, Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: A Practical Approach^[1.] and Applying Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML.^[2.]

Note

Doug and Matt are currently under contract with Addison-Wesley to replace the two previously mentioned titles with a combined title: Use Case Driven Object Modeling: Theory and Practice.[3.]

You’ll find that we don’t cover software agility much in this chapter. We’re presenting ICONIX Process as a core object modeling process, then in Part 2 of this book we’ll show an example of how to apply Agile ICONIX to a real-life project.

Note

In later chapters we provide lots of practical examples to show exactly how ICONIX Process is applied. So in reading this chapter, you might find it useful to skip ahead and look at some of the later examples. Similarly, when reading the later chapters in detail, you might find it useful to refer back to this chapter frequently to get a reminder of the underlying theory.

Figure 3-1 shows how ICONIX Process defines a practical core subset of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This diagram ties in with Figure 4-1, which shows how Agile ICONIX defines a core subset of agile practices.