Introduction
Content Note
Much of the content in this chapter was adapted from Nathan Bean’s CIS 400 course at K-State, with the author’s permission. That content is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
As software systems became more complex, it became harder to talk and reason about them. Unified Modeling Language (UML) attempted to correct for this by providing a visual, diagrammatic approach to communicate the structure and function of a program. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a UML diagram might be worth a thousand lines of code.
Key Terms
Some key terms to learn in this chapter are:
- Unified Modeling Language
- Class Diagrams
- Typed Elements
- Constraints
- Stereotypes
- Attributes
- Operations
- Association
- Generalization
- Realization
- Composition
- Aggregation
Key Skills
The key skill to learn in this chapter is how to draw UML class diagrams for programs we are developing.