Layered Design Visualisation
Ákos Frohner · 1999
Designing an object-oriented system is a process that is well supported by a great number of notations and design techniques such as UML. Although UML provides notation for almost all aspects of objectoriented software design, it lacks features for describing aspects that are outside of the design domain or require information from different diagrams. For example, there are no good notations for the visualisation of frameworks, friendship relationships, components, meta-level aspects and security considerations. As a possible solution we propose to use multi-layer diagrams. Such diagrams allow the user of an object-oriented CASE tool to concentrate on the specific feature which she or he is interested in, and filter out the remaining parts. The basic idea is explained here in more detail through the task of framework documentation. We give further examples using the layered structure to support the design of complex systems and their three-dimensional visualisation.