September 2003
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
4h 15m
English
book
UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Third Edition
by Martin Fowler
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Chapter 11. Activity Diagrams
Activity diagrams are a technique to describe procedural logic, business process, and work flow. In many ways, they play a role similar to flowcharts, but the principal difference between them and flowchart notation is that they support parallel behavior.
Activity diagrams have seen some of the biggest changes over the versions of the UML, so they have, not surprisingly, been significantly extended and altered again for UML 2. In UML 1, activity diagrams were seen as special cases of state diagrams. This caused a lot of problems for people modeling work flows, which activity diagrams are well suited for. In UML 2, that tie was removed.
Figure 11.1 shows a simple example of an activity diagram. We begin at the initial ...