Section 2.3 The Unified Modeling Language
The Unified Modeling Language, or UML, is an industry standard graphical notation for describing and analysing software designs. The symbols and graphs used in the UML are an outgrowth of efforts in the 1980’s and early 1990’s to devise standards for Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE). UML represents a unification of these efforts. In 1994 - 1995 several leaders in the development of modeling languages, Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, and James Rumbaugh, attempted to unify their work. To eliminate the method fragmentation that they concluded was impeding commercial adoption of modeling tools, they developed UML, which provided a level playing field for all tool vendors.
UML has been accepted as a standard by the Object Management Group (OMG). The OMG is a non-profit organization with about 700 members that sets standards for distributed object-oriented computing.
UML was initially largely funded by the employer of Booch, Jacobson and Rumbaugh, aka the three amigos, Rational Software, which was sold to IBM in 2002.
A software model is any textual or graphic representation of an aspect of a software system. This could include requirements, behavior, states or how the system is installed. The model is not the actual system, rather it describes different aspects of the system to be developed. UML defines a set of diagrams and corresponding rules that can be used to model a system. The diagrams in the UML are generally divided into two broad categories or views, static and dynamic.
This course does not provide anywhere near a comprehensive review of the UML. The intent is to introduce you to the basics you need to understand the designs presented in this course. Since there is an excellent chance you will encounter the UML or something very similar to it in your professional career and the diagrams used in this course are used not only in the UML, but in other modeling systems as well.
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