THE 4+1 MODEL

THE 4+1 MODEL

Hi, I am going to talk about the 4+1 model and why it's important to document a project.

This model consists of 5 important areas/views:

• Logical View. It shows what sort of objects/classes we are going to be building for the product. 
• Implementation/Development View. It shows to the developer how the system is organized during the development.
• Process View. Describes the concurrency and synchronized aspects of the process and software.
• Physical View. It shows how software and hardware are related. Architecture diagrams
• Use-Case View. This is the +1, also called scenarios, which describe is how the system interacts with users.

The image above is a perfect representation of applying the 4+1 model, when you are taking notes of requirements, basically, you are doing user stories and use cases diagrams, after that, you need to do the software analysis and modeling using tools of the UML so you can cover the areas of logical view and implementation view, and finally, you need to create a diagram or something that shows the architecture where the software is going to be stored, so having these, your documentation is going to be useful and having it in a clearer way will cause that everyone can understand it in a fast way and can develop the source code or maintain it in a fast way and always will be easier to have in mind the requirements that are stablished in those documents, so, in conclusion, it is important to apply this model because as I say at the beginning of this entry, it is very useful to have documentation so everyone in the team and those who are new in the team can understand the system and can save you a lot of hours when you need to maintain or create new modules in your system because it will be easier to remember the key parts of your system, remember that it is recommended to have a simple documentation so everyone can be happy and can have better chances to present excellent results at the end of the day.