Modeling Accounting Processes Using UML: The Drifters Example

Abstract

This paper includes a comprehensive case that details a simplified business system for the Drifters Snowboard Company. We include a description of the business processes of Drifters relative to the data needs which includes an entity-relationship (ER) dia-gram and a unified modeling language (UML) diagram. Both diagrams are con-structed to compare and contrast each method and to give those that perform modeling tasks a sense of some of the real world issues that are involved.

In the past ten years, object-orientation has become viable and important in both the modeling and implementation arenas. Programming languages such as C++ and Java incorporate object-oriented (O-O) features and database management systems (DBMS) such as O2, ObjectStore, Poet, etc. and are advertised as "pure" O-O DBMS. Conversely, some systems such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQL Serve,r etc. have incorporated some O-O features into essentially relational database technology in order to remain competitive.

On the modeling dimension, the entity-relationship (E/R) diagramming method with its notable variants has been dominant for more than 20 years. This is probably due to its simplicity and its power to accurately represent the data needs of nearly all applica-tions. In the last 10 years however, O-O modeling has become increasingly popular because it correlates nicely to O-O implementations and because its modeling power is requisite for the greater complexity inherit in contemporary information systems. Re-cently, UML has become the de facto O-O modeling variant, so hence, we illustrate UML in the same case we use ER diagramming. The comparison and contrast is useful to those who are migrating to UML data modeling.