Pragmatic approach to protect human assets in migration to object oriented analysis

This paper is based on results from the EURESCOM project P414-TMN (Telecommunications Management Network) Guidelines, in which a case study within the VPN (virtual private network) has been executed. Object orientation is a very promising approach in software development. Implementation of object orientation is a huge task. Therefore this paper is limited to one well defined area, object oriented analysis. The experience from the project showed, that object orientation is not intuitively understood and that people create contradicting models. This indicates, that with sufficient training one person can make an object oriented model but in working groups, considerable contradictions may arise. Most of the problems seem to be related to different business processes. It is obvious that the best properties of both approaches are needed, so this paper presents studies the expansion of existing business practices with object oriented techniques. The study shows, that, from the human point of view, there are good possibilities to reap most of the benefits of object orientated analysis by adapting the techniques to company specific conditions. However, analysis is only a small part of the software life cycle and must be fully integrated, including tools, to produce full benefits