Thursday, December 23, 2010

UML one liner

1. The UML gives everyone from business analyst to designer to programmer a common vocabulary to talk about software design.
2. Use Case diagrams help you specify the user goals that the system must carry out.
3. Class diagrams show the physical structure of the objects in the system and their static relationships.
4. Sequence and collaboration diagrams show the dynamic interactions between instances used to carry out a single use case.
5. Use case diagrams describe what a system does from the standpoint of an external observer. The emphasis is on what a system does rather than how.
6. A model is an abstraction of the underlying problem.
7. The domain is the actual world from which the problem comes.
8. Models consist of objects that interact by sending each other messages.
9. Objects have things they know (attributes) and things they can do (behaviors or operations). The values of an object's attributes determine its state.
10. Classes are the "blueprints" for objects. A class wraps attributes (data) and behaviors (methods or functions) into a single distinct entity.
11. Objects are instances of classes.
12. An actor is a person, organization, or external system that plays a role in one or more interactions with your system.
13. Use Cases are used to specify the functional requirements of the system.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

UML: Unified Modeling Language

Unified Modeling Language or UML is the standard language for describing, visualizing, and documenting the object-oriented (OO) systems. UML is a collection of a variety of diagrams for different purposes and each type of diagram models a particular aspect of OO design in an easy to understand and visual manner.

The UML standard specifies exactly how the diagrams are to be drawn and what each component in the diagram means. UML is not dependent on any particular programming language, instead it focuses one the fundamental concepts and ideas that model a system.

It is a standardized language in which to specify the artefacts and components of a software system, how the diagrams are to be drawn and what each component in the diagram means. It is important to understand that the UML describes a notation and not a process. It does not put forth a single method or process of design, but rather is a standardized tool that can be used in a design process.

The UML gives everyone from business analyst to designer to programmer a common vocabulary to talk about software design.