•How do we handle the situation when we have multiple classes but realize the classes have a significant amount of information in common?
•How do we handle the situation when we have a single class but realize that there are differences among the different objects in that class that may drive us to break up the class into two classes?
Specialization
When the majority of the information about two types of objects are the same, but there exists some different specialized data
•Let’s say this class already exists for a small startup company
•All employees have an ID, firstName, lastName, and salary
•The startup has grown enough that they now want to hire consultants
•Instead of salary, consultants have an hourly rate
•Subclasses (or inherited classes) contain the specialized information
•Permanent and Consultant are both subclasses of Employee
•Superclasses (top classes) should be as general as possible
•Future changes to the superclass would affect all subclasses
•Easy to add additional subclasses
Generalization
When you have 2 or more existing classes and realize they have some information in common
Adding a superclass and pulling out the common information from the 2 subclasses into the superclass (the same as specialization only in the opposite direction)
Inheritance
•Generalization and Specialization are examples of inheritance
•SubClassA and SubClassB are both specialized types of SuperClass
•SubClassA and SubCLassB will have all the attributes of SuperClass in addition to their own attributes