Organization of This Book

Chapter 1, Classes, explores how to do basic modeling of things and concepts in the real world. The chapter includes extensive detail on how to record details of classes as well as more complex structures involving classes. This chapter also includes advice on how to discover classes.

Chapter 2, Class Relationships, explores the various kinds of relationships among classes, which provide the foundation for the structure of a new system. The focus is on the three major relationship types: associations, aggregations, and dependencies.

Chapter 3, Class and Object Diagrams, provides various examples of the diagrams that show classes and their relationships. The chapter also discusses object diagrams, which capture aspects of an executing system as "snapshots."

Chapter 4, Use Cases, describes the primary means by which you can use the UML to capture functional requirements. These requirements are expressed in terms of the specific actions that external entities and the system perform in executing required and optional behavior. The chapter also offers advice on how to write robust use case text.

Chapter 5, Packages, describes the means by which you can use the UML to group various model elements that are conceptually related .

Chapter 6, Events, Actions, and Activities, begins the exploration of the dynamic side of the UML in terms of the various ways by which object behavior is initiated, the UML's action language (which defines the individual, primitive functions that serve as the lowest level of behavior specification), and activities, which provide control and data sequencing constraints among actions as well as nested structuring mechanisms for control and scope.

Chapter 7, State Machines, discusses the UML constructs that you can use to model discrete object behavior in terms of the states that an object can reside in and the transitions that can happen between those states.

Chapter 8, Interactions, discusses the various aspects of interactions. The focus is on the messages that pass back and forth between objects during system execution. The chapter also provides examples of the four types of interaction diagrams that UML 2.0 supports.

Chapter 9, Components, Deployment, and Higher-Level Modeling, focuses on the modeling of autonomous units within a system or subsystem that the modeler can use to define software systems of arbitrary size and complexity. The chapter also discusses the modeling of the deployment of those units.

Chapter 10, Profiles, Templates, and Information Flows, discusses topics that don't quite fit into the preceding chapters, yet are important elements of the UML. The focus is on profiles, which are stereotyped packages that contain elements customized for a particular domain or purpose, and templates, which provide ways to create families of model elements such as classes, packages, and collaborations.

The book also includes the following end matter:

• An appendix that describes the various stereotypes that are built in to the UML

• A glossary, which contains definitions for all the terms I introduce

• A bibliography, which lists all the books I mention

• A complete index