The Role of Notation

Notation plays an important part in any model—it is the glue that holds the process together. “Notation has three roles:

  • It serves as the language for communicating decisions that are not obvious or cannot be inferred from the code itself.

  • It provides semantics that are rich enough to capture all important strategic and tactical decisions.

  • It offers a form concrete enough for humans to reason and for tools to manipulate.”[1]

    [1] Booch, Grady. Object Solutions. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides a very robust notation, which grows from analysis into design. Certain elements of the notation (for example, classes, associations, aggregations, inheritance) are introduced during analysis. ...

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