Visual Modeling with Rational Rose 2002 and UML

Foreword

Edward Tufte, in his seminal work, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, notes that “graphics reveal data.” What he means by this statement is that certain complex sets of data, when visualized graphically, convey far more information to the reader than the raw data itself. So it is with software; as our industry continues to develop systems of greater and greater complexity our ability to manage that complexity follows our ability to visualize our systems above the level of their raw lines of code. Indeed, the market success of languages such as Visual Basic (for which there are more developers than any other programming language, even COBOL) and visual front ends to C++ and Java point out that visualization is essential to ...