Unified Modeling Language (UML) Quiz

UML Contents

• UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a general-purpose modeling language
• Its used to specify, visualize, construct, and document business process and system components.

Development Stages

• UML development has evolved from various object-oriented modeling methods (Booch, OMT, OOSE)
• In October 1994, Booch and Rumbaugh started to unify their methods
• In 1995, the Unified Method (UML) 0.8 was released
• Jacobson joined in autumn 1995 to contribute OOSE
• The goal was to create a unified language and an easier modeling approach

Basic Components

• UML is composed of basic elements and their relations.
• Entities
  • Structure: classes, interfaces, collaborations, use cases, active classes, components, and nodes
  • Behavior: interactions and state machines
  • Grouping: packages
  • Annotations: notes
• Relations
  • Dependency
  • Association
  • Aggregation
  • Composition
  • Generalization
  • Realization

Use Case Diagrams

• Use case diagrams visualize actor interactions with a system.
  • Actors: external entities interacting with the system
  • Use cases: actions the system performs for the actors
• They show the system's functionality from the users' perspective.
• Use cases and actors are linked with associations.

Class Diagrams

• Class diagrams represent the system's static structure, showing classes and their attributes.
• Attributes: properties of classes
• Operations: actions performed by classes
• Relationships: associations, inheritance (generalization), and realization
• Classes are grouped into packages for better organization.

Object Diagrams

• Object diagrams illustrate instances of classes.
• Instances are specific objects that conform to particular class descriptions, hence they are not represented without a class.
• They show the object's attributes and their values at a given moment.

Statechart Diagrams

• These diagrams depict the lifecycle of an object instance, showing its different states and transitions.
• States
  • Representing the different conditions or stages an object can be in.
• Transitions
  • How an object moves from one state to another following certain events, triggers, guards etc.
• They are useful for modeling dynamic behavior.

Activity Diagrams

• Activity diagrams visually track the flow of execution within a system or part of system.
• Activities: tasks or actions
• Transitions: flow from one activity to another
• Control-flow constructs (e.g., decisions, loops)
• They can represent concurrent activities and conditional operations.
• Swimlanes: used to arrange activities by the different responsibilities involved in the task.

Interaction Diagrams

• These diagrams are used to show the different types of interactions between objects. They can be
• Sequence diagrams
• Collaboration diagrams
• Both are types of Interaction Diagrams.

Sequence Diagrams

• Sequence diagrams illustrate message exchanges between objects over time.
  • Object lifelines: depicted as vertical lines.
  • Messages: depicted as arrows connecting lifelines, representing communication points over time.
• The order of messages on the diagram reflects the sequence of execution.

Collaboration Diagrams

• Collaboration diagrams show interactions between objects, but the focus is on the structural links between them rather than on the sequence of occurrence over time.

Component Diagrams

• Component diagrams display the physical structure of a software system, showing the components and their dependencies.
• It shows the physical structure and configuration of a software system.

Deployment Diagrams

• Deployment diagrams represent the physical deployment of software components on hardware nodes.
• Nodes: physical computing resources like servers, laptops or various devices.
• Components: software elements deployed onto nodes
• Links: communication paths or connections between nodes.
• These diagrams show the system's physical architecture.