Section 1.2. Background

1.2. Background

UML has become the de facto standard for modeling software applications and is growing in popularity in modeling other domains. Its roots go back to three distinct methods: the Booch Method by Grady Booch, the Object Modeling Technique coauthored by James Rumbaugh, and Objectory by Ivar Jacobson. Known as the Three Amigos, Booch, Rumbaugh, and Jacobson kicked off what became the first version of UML, in 1994. In 1997, UML was accepted by the Object Management Group (OMG) and released as UML v1.1.

Since then, UML has gone through several revisions and refinements leading up to the current 2.0 release. Each revision has tried to address problems and shortcomings identified in the previous versions, leading to an interesting expansion and contraction of the language. UML 2.0 is by far the largest UML specification in terms of page count (the superstructure alone is over 600 pages), but it represents the cleanest, most compact version of UML yet.