The Unified Modeling Language User Guide SECOND EDITION [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Getting Started

When you build a house, you must do more than create blueprints. Mind you, blueprints are important because they help you visualize, specify, and document the kind of house you want to build so that you'll build the right house at the right time at the right price. Eventually, however, you've got to turn your floor plans and elevation drawings into real walls, floors, and ceilings made of wood, stone, or metal. Not only will you build your house out of these raw materials, you'll also incorporate pre-built artifacts, such as cabinets, windows, doors, and vents. If you are renovating a house, you'll reuse even larger artifacts, such as whole rooms and frameworks.

It's the same with software. You create use case diagrams to reason about the desired behavior of your system. You specify the vocabulary of your domain with class diagrams. You create sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, state diagrams, and activity diagrams to specify the way the things in your vocabulary work together to carry out this behavior. Eventually, you will turn these logical blueprints into things that live in the world of bits, such as executables, libraries, tables, files, and documents. You'll find that you must build some of these artifacts from scratch, but you'll also end up reusing older artifacts in new ways.

With the UML, you use artifact diagrams to visualize the static aspect of these physical artifacts and their relationships and to specify their details for construction, as in Figure 30-1.