Glossary

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ACTION

Behavior that accompanies a transition event. An action is considered to take zero time and cannot be interrupted .

ACTIVITY

Behavior that occurs while in a state. An activity can be interrupted by a transition event.

ACTOR

Someone or something external to the system that must interact with the system under development.

AGGREGATION

A stronger form of an association where the relationship is between a whole and its part(s).

ARCHITECTURE

The logical and physical structure of a system, forged by all the strategic and tactical design decisions applied during development.

ASSOCIATION

A bidirectional, semantic connection between two classes.

ASSOCIATION CLASS

A class that holds information belonging to a link between two objects and not with one object alone.

ATTRIBUTE

A data definition held by objects of a class. The structure of the class.

AUTOMATIC TRANSITION

Transition that occurs automatically after the activity within the originating state is completed.

BACKGROUND PROBLEM STATEMENT

Cumulative background material assembled before working on a project. It often includes a description and critique of the previous system.

BASE PROJECT

A project that supplements the information in a program-specific project, usually with information about header files for compiler specific libraries or other class libraries being used.

BUSINESS GOALS

Prioritized statements of the organization's needs used to guide decision making and tradeoff throughout the development process.

CLASS

A description of a group of objects with common properties (attributes), common behavior (operations), common relationships to other objects (associations and aggregations), and common semantics.

CLASS DIAGRAM

A view or picture of some or all of the classes in a model.

CLASS LIBRARY

A library consisting of classes that may be used by other developers.

COLLABORATION DIAGRAM

A diagram that shows object interactions organized around the objects and their links to each other.

COMPONENT DIAGRAM

A diagram that shows the organizations and dependencies among software components, including source code components, run-time components, and executable components .

CONSISTENCY CHECKING

The process of ensuring that information in both the static view of the system (class diagrams) and the dynamic view of the system (sequence and collaboration diagrams) are telling the same story.

CONSTRUCTION

Building the product as a series of incremental iterations.

CONTROLLED UNIT

A package that can be loaded or saved independently and integrated into a configuration management system.

DECISION POINT

A point in an activity diagram where guard conditions are used to indicate different possible transitions.

DEPLOYMENT DIAGRAM

A diagram used to show the allocation of processes to nodes in the physical design of a system.

DESIGN

How the system will be realized in the implementation phase.

ELABORATION

Planning the necessary activities and required resources; specifying the features and designing the architecture.

GENERALIZATION

Process used to create superclasses that encapsulate structure and behavior common to several classes.

GUARD

A condition that must evaluate to TRUE in order for a specified transition to occur.

IMPLEMENTATION

The production of the code that will result in an executable system.

INCEPTION

The specification of the project vision.

INHERITANCE

A relationship among classes, where one class shares the structure and/or behavior defined in one or more other classes.

ITERATION PLAN

Schedule of the iterative releases planned for a system.

ITERATIVE AND INCREMENTAL LIFE CYCLE

Development of a series of architectural releases that evolve into the final system.

KEY MECHANISM

A design decision that has local architectural implications.

LAYER

The collection of packages at the same level of abstraction.

MODEL

An abstraction that portrays the essentials of a complex problem or structure, making it easier to manipulate.

OBJECT

A concept, abstraction, or thing with sharp boundaries and meaning for an application.

OPERATION

Work that one object performs upon another in order to elicit a reaction. The behavior of the class.

PARTITION

The packages that form a part of a given level of abstraction.

POLYMORPHISM

Provides the capability for clients to manipulate objects in terms of their common superclasses.

PROOF OF CONCEPT PROTOTYPE

Prototype used to validate the initial assumptions stated for a given problem space.

REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS

Description of what the system should do.

SCENARIO

An instance of a use case ”it is one path through the flow of events for the use case.

SEQUENCE DIAGRAM

A diagram that depicts object interactions arranged in time sequence.

SPECIALIZATION

Process used to create subclasses that represent refinements in which structure and/or behavior are added, modified, or even hidden.

STATE

The cumulative results of the behavior of an object; one of the possible conditions in which an object may exist.

STATE TRANSITION

The passing from one state to another state.

STATECHART DIAGRAM

Diagram used to show the state space of a given class, the events that cause a transition from one state to another, and the actions that result from a state change.

STEREOTYPE

A new type of modeling element that extends the metamodel. Stereotypes must be based on elements that are part of the UML metamodel.

SUBCLASS

A class that inherits from one or more classes.

SUPERCLASS

The class from which another class inherits.

SWIMLANE

A partition on activity diagrams for organizing responsibilities for activities. They often correspond to organizational units in a business model.

SYNCHRONIZATION BAR

Horizontal or vertical bars that show activities that may be done concurrently. Synchronization bars are also used to show joins in the workflow.

TEST

The verification of the entire system.

TRANSITION

Supplying the product to the user community (manufacturing, delivering, and training).

UNIFIED MODELING LANGUAGE ( UML )

A language used to specify, visualize, and document the artifacts of an object-oriented system under development.

USE CASE

Representation of the business processes of the system. The model of a dialogue between an actor and the system.

USE CASE DIAGRAM

A graphical representation of some or all of the actors, use cases, and their interactions.

USE CASE MODEL

The collection of actors, use cases, and use case diagrams for a system.

VISUAL MODELING

A way of thinking about problems using models organized around real-world ideas.

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