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16
Preface
EUROCOPTER, the French Navy and by several other large projects in aerospace,
defence, transport, energy and nuclear applications.
However, the context of software development is a moving target. Object oriented
method have gained wide acceptance in the meantime, extensive use of HOOD
showed some difficulties, and there was a desire to support other programming languages. At the same time, C had moved to C++ [Stroustrup91] and Ada 83 [Ada83]
had been replaced by Ada 95 [Ada]. For these reasons, an update of the method became necessary. This was achieved in 1995 as HOOD 4 [HRM4]. This is the current
state of the method, and the one which is described in this book.
With thousands of engineers trained in Europe and the availability of several tool sets
and companies providing support for using the method, HOOD is spreading continuously within the industry. The Hood User’s Group has been set-up as an international
non profit organization and is in charge of controlling the evolution of the method.
1.3 Structure of the book
This book is organized in four parts that provide a gradual approach to the HOOD
method.
Part 1 introduces the basic notions of HOOD; starting from general software engineering notions, it provides enough information to allow the reader to understand an
existing HOOD design, at least at the level of the general structure. The part concludes with the presentation of a full HOOD design.
Part 2 then goes into deeper details, and a more formal presentation of the method;
this corresponds to what the reader needs to know about the formalism to write a new
HOOD design.
Part 3 discusses the methodological aspects, i.e. the process that brings from a white
page to a full design.
Part 4 is a full scale example, that shows a full design from the early phases on down
to actual code.
Annexes are included to provide the reader with supplemental information, such as
bibliography, summary of acronyms and notations, and a full index.
As is common nowadays, we have used a Courier font to represent programs and
names that appear in the textual formalism of HOOD.
Paragraphs of this style provide additional information of less importance, or extra details
on a particular point. They can be skipped at first reading.