Practical UML™: A Hands-On Introduction for Developers

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Why is UML important?

Let's look at this question from the point of view of the construction trade. Architects design buildings. Builders use the designs to create buildings. The more complicated the building, the more critical the communication between architect and builder. Blueprints are the standard graphical language that both architects and builders must learn as part of their trade.

Writing software is not unlike constructing a building. The more complicated the underlying system, the more critical the communication among everyone involved in creating and deploying the software. In the past decade, the UML has emerged as the software blueprint language for analysts, designers, and programmers alike. It is now part of the software trade. The UML gives everyone from business analyst to designer to programmer a common vocabulary to talk about software design.

The UML is applicable to object-oriented problem solving. Anyone interested in learning UML must be familiar with the underlying tenet of object-oriented problem solving -- it all begins with the construction of a model. A model is an abstraction of the underlying problem. The domain is the actual world from which the problem comes.

Models consist of objects that interact by sending each other messages. Think of an object as "alive." Objects have things they know (attributes) and things they can do (behaviors or operations). The values of an object's attributes determine its state.

Classes are the "blueprints" for objects. A class wraps attributes (data) and behaviors (methods or functions) into a single distinct entity. Objects are instances of classes.

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se case diagrams

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.

Use case diagrams are closely connected to scenarios. A scenario is an example of what happens when someone interacts with the system. Here is a scenario for a medical clinic.

A use case is a summary of scenarios for a single task or goal. An actor is who or what initiates the events involved in that task. Actors are simply roles that people or objects play. The picture below is a Make Appointment use case for the medical clinic. The actor is a Patient. The connection between actor and use case is a communication association (or communication for short).

Actors are stick figures. Use cases are ovals. Communications are lines that link actors to use cases.

A use case diagram is a collection of actors, use cases, and their communications. We've put Make Appointment as part of a diagram with four actors and four use cases. Notice that a single use case can have multiple actors.

Use case diagrams are helpful in three areas.

• determining features (requirements). New use cases often generate new requirements as the system is analyzed and the design takes shape.
• communicating with clients. Their notational simplicity makes use case diagrams a good way for developers to communicate with clients.
• generating test cases. The collection of scenarios for a use case may suggest a suite of test cases for those scenarios.

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Class diagrams

A Class diagram gives an overview of a system by showing its classes and the relationships among them. Class diagrams are static -- they display what interacts but not what happens when they do interact.

The class diagram below models a customer order from a retail catalog. The central class is the Order. Associated with it are the Customer making the purchase and the Payment. A Payment is one of three kinds: Cash, Check, or Credit. The order contains OrderDetails (line items), each with its associated Item.

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UML class notation is a rectangle divided into three parts: class name, attributes, and operations. Names of abstract classes, such as Payment, are in italics. Relationships between classes are the connecting links.

Our class diagram has three kinds of relationships.

• association -- a relationship between instances of the two classes. There is an association between two classes if an instance of one class must know about the other in order to perform its work. In a diagram, an association is a link connecting two classes.
• aggregation -- an association in which one class belongs to a collection. An aggregation has a diamond end pointing to the part containing the whole. In our diagram, Order has a collection of OrderDetails.
• generalization -- an inheritance link indicating one class is a superclass of the other. A generalization has a triangle pointing to the superclass. Payment is a superclass of Cash, Check, and Credit.

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An association has two ends. An end may have a role name to clarify the nature of the association. For example, an OrderDetail is a line item of each Order.

A navigability arrow on an association shows which direction the association can be traversed or queried. An OrderDetail can be queried about its Item, but not the other way around. The arrow also lets you know who "owns" the association's implementation; in this case, OrderDetail has an Item. Associations with no navigability arrows are bi-directional.

The multiplicity of an association end is the number of possible instances of the class associated with a single instance of the other end. Multiplicities are single numbers or ranges of numbers. In our example, there can be only one Customer for each Order, but a Customer can have any number of Orders.

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Sequence diagrams

Class and object diagrams are static model views. Interaction diagrams are dynamic. They describe how objects collaborate.

A sequence diagram is an interaction diagram that details how operations are carried out -- what messages are sent and when. Sequence diagrams are organized according to time. The time progresses as you go down the page. The objects involved in the operation are listed from left to right according to when they take part in the message sequence.

Below is a sequence diagram for making a hotel reservation. The object initiating the sequence of messages is a Reservation window.

The Reservation window sends a makeReservation() message to a HotelChain. The HotelChain then sends a makeReservation() message to a Hotel. If the Hotel has available rooms, then it makes a Reservation and a Confirmation.

Each vertical dotted line is a lifeline, representing the time that an object exists. Each arrow is a message call. An arrow goes from the sender to the top of the activation bar of the message on the receiver's lifeline. The activation bar represents the duration of execution of the message.

In our diagram, the Hotel issues a self call to determine if a room is available. If so, then the Hotel creates a Reservation and a Confirmation. The asterisk on the self call means iteration (to make sure there is available room for each day of the stay in the hotel). The expression in square brackets, [ ], is a condition.

The diagram has a clarifying note, which is text inside a dog-eared rectangle. Notes can be put into any kind of UML diagram.

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