UML Profile for Framework Architectures, The

2.3. Object diagrams

UML object diagrams are closely related to class diagrams. Because both deal with the structure and the data of the system, object diagrams are often not treated as a stand-alone notation but as a variant of class diagrams. Object diagrams are a useful and important technique for describing snapshots of a system – indeed, important enough to regard and introduce this kind of diagram as a notation on its own. Object diagrams are useful for conveying certain kinds of information that class diagrams cannot. Object diagrams contain objects and, thus, describe a system on an instance level that might occur at runtime. A set of object diagrams can describe variants of object structures to the very same class diagram. A single object ...