ISBN : 978-81-963532-2-3 (E-Book) good idea to explicitly mention the purpose for which a model has beendeveloped, alongwith themodel. Unified Modeling Language (UML) UML, as the name implies, is a modeling language. It may be used to visualize, specify, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. It provides a set of notations (e.g. rectangles, lines, ellipses, etc.) to create a visual model of the system. Like any other language, UML has its own syntax (symbols and sentence formation rules) and semantics (meanings of symbols and sentences). Also, we should clearly understand that UML is not a system design or development methodology, but can be used to document objectoriented and analysis results obtained using some methodology. Origin of UML In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a proliferation of object-oriented design techniques and notations. Different software development houses were using different notations to document their object-oriented designs. These diverse notations used to give rise to a lot of confusion. UML was developed to standardize the large number of object-oriented modeling notations that existed and were used extensively in the early 1990s. The principles ones in use were: • Object Management Technology [Rumbaugh 1991] • Booch’s methodology [Booch 1991] • Object-Oriented Software Engineering [Jacobson 1992] • Odell’s methodology [Odell 1992] • Shaler and Mellor methodology [Shaler 1992] It is needless to say that UML has borrowed many concepts from these modeling techniques. Especially, concepts from the first three methodologies have been heavily 57 Software Engineering Keerthana P, Manasa KN, Ganga D Bengal
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