Given Adam's comment that the diagram is meant to be primarily for
developers / architects as a high-level guide to mifos architecture and data
model / domain model, I'd suggest:
1. stress more on expressing the relationship between major concepts
(typically packages and/or major top level Business Object classes)
2. stress less at detailing on the specifics, say, all the specific
attributes of a class, and in some cases, relationship between minor
classes.
The reasons are that given the existing resources: a) functional
specification and related requirements documents, and b) the actual codes, I
found:
1) there is no easy entry point to understand the big picture and
relationship. The functional specification (and various wikis) helped a bit
in understanding the high level domain model / data model, but they are
scattered. That's why I'd suggest we have some diagrams are often helpful in
documenting those relationship at high level.
E.g., chapter 2 model overview could be expanded a bit to illustrate the
relationship between these major packages / classes.
2) if I want the specific details (down to individual attributes and
business rules), the existing functional specification and actual codes are
quite detailed.
Therefore, I'd say having diagrams that are so detailed has much less value.
Plus, the specifics are going to evolve anyway so more than likely, the info
in diagrams can't catch up with the real life changes anyway.
E.g., in figure 6 (customer classes internal), chapter 5 customer classes,
the diagram could be less detailed in terms of specific attributes.
For figure 7 (customer class external relationship), the relationship is
great; the internal attributes of the customer class is probably just a
distraction (too much details), and we might want to expand a bit more on
the relationship, e.g., the diagram says client, group, and center are all
specific form of customers. It'd be great to let readers know the difference
between them at high level (be it via comments, highlighting attributes of
the specific case, etc.)
- sam
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