UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a standardized language for modeling software systems using graphical notations. It allows project teams to communicate designs, explore potential solutions, and validate requirements and architecture. UML aims to provide a visual modeling language that is independent of programming languages and development processes. This lab introduces students to UML by explaining its history, goals, basic building blocks including model elements, relationships, and diagrams, and how it can be used to model systems from different perspectives.

1. Advance Software Engineering LAB # 01
LAB # 01
OBJECTIVE:
• Introduction To Unified Modeling Language
What is UML?
• UML = Unified Modeling Language
• A standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting software
artifacts.
• Standardized by Object Management Group (OMG).
• Uses mostly graphical notations.
• Helps project teams communicate, explore potential designs, and validate the requirements and
architectural design of the software system
Goals of UML
• Provide users with a ready-to-use, expressive visual modeling language so they can develop
and exchange meaningful models.
• Provide extensibility and specialization mechanisms to extend the core concepts.
• Be independent of particular programming languages and development processes.
• Provide a formal basis for understanding the modeling language.
• Encourage the growth of the OO tools market.
• Support higher-level development concepts such as collaborations, frameworks, patterns and
components
• Integrate best practices.
Why do we model?
• Unified Modeling Language
• Provide structure for problem solving
• Furnish abstractions to manage complexity
• Experiment to explore multiple solutions
1

2. Advance Software Engineering LAB # 01
Why do we model graphically
• Graphics reveal content, structure, …
• 1 bitmap = 1 megaword
History of UML
• OO modeling languages appeared in 1980s as various methodologists experimented with
different approaches to object-oriented analysis and design.
• The number of OO modeling languages exploded during early 1990s .
• Many users had trouble finding complete satisfaction in any one modeling language, fueling
the "method wars”.
• By the mid-1990s, revisions of these methods began to appear that incorporated each other’s
techniques.
Our Focus: Unified Modeling Language
• Language = syntax + semantics
– Syntax = rules by which language elements (e.g., words) are assembled into expressions
(e.g., phrases, clauses).
– Semantics = rules by which syntactic expressions are assigned meanings.
• The basic building blocks (syntax) of UML are:
– Model elements (classes, interfaces, components, use cases)
– Relationships (associations, generalization, dependencies)
– Diagrams (class diagrams, use case diagrams, interaction diagrams)
• Used to create large, complex structures
• Each UML diagram is designed to let developers and customers view a software system from a
different perspective and in varying degrees of abstraction.
2