Prep: Cloud 3

Intro

IoT projects can be very difficult to understand.  One of the tools that can aid understanding a specific sequence of interactions between devices and services is the Sequence Diagram.  One goal of this studio will be to use Sequence Diagrams to help explain interactions between Particle devices, which are representative of most IoT device/cloud interactions, and services.

Studio Prep (Monday)

IoT projects often require exchanging messages between multiple entities. This can lead to complex systems that are difficult to understand.

One tool that can be particularly helpful in these sorts of systems is Sequence Diagrams. Sequence Diagrams are most commonly associated with design of object oriented software and are often used to depict the interactions between objects in complex programs. That being said, they can also be used to show interactions between the components of an IoT system.

In this class sequence diagrams are just used as an informal tool to:

  1. help understand all the various interactions that may take place,
  2. as a way to communicate to document your system’s behavior,
  3. as a form of documentation, and
  4. as way to help you identify requirements that you may other wise overlook.
    Much like paper prototypes, they provide you with some ability to formally think about how a system will work before you actually implement it.

To prepare for studio, review a few different perspectives on Sequence Diagrams: