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It has been known for some time that the marriage between OO and real time systems development has been an unhappy one. This book introduces a methodology known as Octopus which aims to address some of the problems such as object to process mapping, synchronisation, concurrency issues, etc. The method was developed by the authors whilst working on a number of real time projects and is based on OMT and Fusion. The Octopus method spans the entire software development life cycle, from requirements analysis to implementation.

The book itself is very well written and is easy to read. The first chapter gives an overview of real time systems, the OO paradigm and the relationship between the two. The next chapter may be described as a 'spoiler' chapter as it gives an overview of the Octopus method as described in the rest of the book. There then follow a number of chapters that describe the Octopus method in full, from requirements capture using use cases, through analysis, design and implementation. The last two chapters contain two complete case studies. One of a subscriber line tester (performs various test on the landline that connects a telephone to a telephone exchange) and one of a car cruise control system. Both case studies go through the Octopus method from beginning to end and contain the complete results from the use cases to the source code.

This book is of high quality and I can highly recommend it to anybody with an interest in the subject matter.