CASE STUDY
Generalization, Specialization and Inheritance:
Terms such as superclass, subclass, or inheritance come to mind when thinking about the object-oriented approach. These concepts are very important when dealing with object-oriented programming languages such as Java, Smalltalk, or C++. For modeling classes that illustrate technical concepts they are secondary. The reason for this is that modeling relevant objects or ideas from the real world gives little opportunity for using inheritance (compare the class diagram of our case study
Generalization:
Generalization is the process of extracting shared characteristics from two or more classes, and combining them into a generalized superclass. Shared characteristics can be attributes, associations, or methods.
Specialization:
In contrast to generalization, specialization means creating new subclasses from an existing class. If it turns out that certain attributes, associations, or methods only apply to some of the objects of the class, a subclass can be created. The most inclusive class in a generalization/specialization is called the superclass and is generally located at the top of the diagram. The more specific classes are called subclasses and are generally placed below the superclass.
