baselines and configurations. Organizing and aligning the work and work-packages along feature-boundaries vastly simplifies and facilitates traceability and status accounting/reporting.
FDD and Color Modeling: The Four Color Archetypes and Their Grammar
Coad's Color Modeling method describes four basic archetypes for the kinds of objects that participate in an object-oriented domain model:
• The moment interval archetype: These are events (an important moment in time) and transactions (an important interval in time) that are the context or backdrop for important system operations and user-interactions. Examples might be a sale, a purchase order, opening/closing an account or withdrawing/depositing to or from an account. They are similar to the states, transitions, and activities in a traditional state-model diagram. Moment interval classes and objects are depicted in UML color modeling diagrams using the color pink.
• The role archetype: A role is a particular way that an actor or an agent (a party, place or thing) participates in an interaction with the system. Role objects are depicted in UML color models with the color yellow.
• The catalog entry description archetype: A description is quite simply a catalog-like entry that classifies or labels an object. Such objects typically represent some abstract collection of values that catalog or classify all objects of their type. Descriptions provide behavior to access information about their characteristics, but they do not, by themselves, change the way the system behaves. They provide structured information but no real overall functionality to the system. They don't do much of anything, they just exist and have attributes and characteristics that need to be used by the system. Description objects are blue in a UML color model.
• The party, place or thing archetype: These are objects that are uniquely identifiable entities that may play different roles in initiating, influencing, or realizing the results of system behavior/functionality. These are made green in UML color models.
These different archetypes from the basic grammatical elements of a sentence that describe a feature or requirement of the system: a subject comprised of a noun (or pronoun) and any descriptive adjectives; and a predicate that consist of a verb (action), an object (or complement) that receives the action of the sentence, along with any descriptive modifiers or qualifiers. There are some other basic color modeling rules that are pretty much the visual equivalent of grammatical rules for the valid and invalid ways of connecting these archetypes together in a domain model. The colors used in the model help make it very easy to see when correct grammatical structure and semantics are and are not present in each part of the model.