C++ All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Describing Your Program with UML

In This Chapter

• Moving up to UML and modeling with it

• Designing with diagrams

• Going through iterations

• Stepping through phases

• Performing workflows

The ancient people knew something that we don't know. Instead of wasting their time writing these big, long sentences and descriptions, they used hieroglyphics, pictures that just got right to the point. One picture = one statement. It wasn't until the twentieth century that people in the computer world started getting back to their ancient roots and realized that maybe there was something to be said for all those drawings and pictures. One day, while working late, a small group of researchers realized that a nifty way to describe software is through drawings. And thus they came up with the Unified Modeling Language, or UML for short (pronounced, well, just You-Em-Ell).

In this chapter, we talk about what UML is and how you can use it to model your programs. We give a brief overview of the types of diagrams it includes, and we talk about the difference between a methodology and a modeling language.

Moving Up to UML

The Unified Modeling Language has an interesting history. When object-oriented programming was just getting off the ground in the late 1980s, several people came up with different ways to draw various diagrams to help people design their classes. This, of course, was nothing new. In addition to ancient people who used drawings in their hieroglyphics, people have always had a tendency to draw ...