Masterminds of Programming

Chapter 14. UML

How do you communicate ideas about the design of software to other people? The world of construction uses blueprints. UML—the Unified Modeling Language—is a graphical language intended to represent the artifacts of a software project. The resulting combination of the object-oriented analysis of James Rumbaugh, the object-oriented design of Grady Booch, and object-oriented software engineering of Ivar Jacobson allows developers and analysts to model their software through specific types of diagrams. Though the language has multiple successive standards, you’ve likely used some of its concepts in quick whiteboard drawings.

Learning and Teaching

I read that you started working at Ericsson knowing nearly nothing about programming. How did you learn?

Ivar Jacobson: I started working at Ericsson without knowing anything about telecommunications. It was a valuable experience. Even though I worked in a division that developed hardware switches, I could abstract from that the whole idea of building large systems. I worked there for almost four years, and I learned how to think about systems in general. That knowledge was very unique, because people who developed software had no experience in building large systems.

I was an electrical engineer—probably the only one who had an academic degree in engineering. Most people there had no academic degree. I had learned at university how to attack problems, and I also obtained a lot of self-confidence that you could solve basically every ...