When to use the UML

Use the UML mainly when you want to communicate the knowledge a software system to a number of different people.  The UML was purposefully designed to be non-technical so that developers, customers and implementers (programmers) could all ¡°speak the same language.¡±  If a business and technical people can agree on what a system should do, the chances improve that the final product will be useful (Farrell, 413).

            Now that you have and idea about what the UML and Object-Oriented programming is I will now try to show you how you can design a simple software program utilizing the UML.  The UML capitalizes on the use of diagrams.  These diagrams are use to graphically depict certain characteristics of the system including features, functionality and relationship among components.

The UML use a number of diagrams, each one used to describe a different section or area about the system in question.  These diagrams also let you depict the system in a way that it most relates to the person who you are describing the system to.  For example, a business user will most value a system¡¯s use case diagrams because they illustrate who is doing what.  On the other hand, programmers would will find class and object diagrams more useful because they help explain details of how to build classes and objects into the applications (Farrell, 2002).  The UML diagrams utilize different shapes and symbols to demonstrate the use of its diagrams.

The UML's Main Diagrams: