UML Diagram

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is used to specify, visualize, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. It captures decisions and understanding about systems that must be constructed. It is used to understand, design, browse, configure, maintain, and control information about such systems. It is intended for use with all development methods, life cycle stages, application domains, and media. The modeling language is intended to unify past experience about modeling techniques and to incorporate current software best practices into a standard approach. UML includes semantic concepts, notation, and guidelines. It has static, dynamic, environmental, and organizational parts. It is intended to be supported by interactive visual modeling tools that have code generators and report writers. The UML specification does not define a standard process but is intended to be useful with an iterative development process. It is intended to support most existing object oriented development processes.


The UML captures information about the static structure and dynamic behavior of a system. A system is modeled as a collection of discrete objects that interact to perform work that ultimately benefits an outside user. The static structure defines the kinds of objects important to a system and to its implementation, as well as the relationships among the objects. The dynamic behavior defines the history of objects over time and the communications among objects to accomplish goals.


Modeling a system from several separate but related viewpoints permits it to be understood for different purposes.The UML also contains organizational constructs for arranging models into packages that permit software teams to partition large systems into workable pieces, to understand and control dependencies among the packages, and to manage the versioning of model units in a complex development environment. It
contains constructs for representing implementation decisions and for organizing run-time elements into components.


UML is not a programming language. Tools can provide code generators from UML into a variety of programming languages, as well as construct reverse engineered models from existing programs. The UML is not a highly formal language intended for theorem proving. There are a number of such languages, but they are not easy to understand or to use for most purposes. The UML is a general- purpose modeling language. For specialized domains, such as GUI layout, VLSI circuit design, or rule-based artificial intelligence, a more specialized tool with a special language might be appropriate. UML is a discrete modeling language. It is not intended to model continuous systems such as those found in engineering and physics. UML is intended to be a universal general-purpose modeling language for discrete systems such as those made of software, firmware, or digital logic.