Overview of the Unified Modeling Lang Language - Extension of an Article

Mature engineering disciplines are generally characterized by accepted methodical standards for describing all relevant artifacts of their subject matter. Such standards not only enable practitioners to collaborate, but they also contribute to the development of the whole discipline. In 1994, Grady Booch, Jim Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson joined together to unify the plethora of existing object-oriented systems engineering approaches at semantic and notation level. Their effort leads to the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a well-known, general-purpose, tool-supported, process-independent, and industry-standardized modeling language for visualizing, describing, specifying, and documenting systems artifacts. This article overviews UML’s main concepts and gives some insights into advanced topics. Furthermore, the future of UML is discussed. The discussion is based on UML version 1.5.