Book Image

UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial

Book Image

UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial

Overview of this book

Most books about UML describe it almost in its entirety. Inevitably you're left with only a superficial knowledge of the range of UML elements, without a deep and intuitive understanding of how to apply UML as a whole to real world design problems. This book doesn't set out to cover all of UML, but instead pulls together those parts of UML with immediate practical relevance and presents them as part of a coherent process for using UML in your actual development projects.This book is designed to be read while you work on a real project. After an initial review of the essentials of UML and the design process, it begins with the modeling of a business system and its business processes, in this case an airport. Then the IT system intended to serve that business process is described and analysed. Finally the integration of the system into the production environment is covered in detail. The book can be used in two ways: it can be read through as a thorough grounding in how UML really works in practice; in addition it can be used as stand alone guide to that particular aspect of your own project. Both result in an intuitive understanding of how to actually use UML.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

4.4 Interaction View


4.4.1 Seeing What Happens Inside the IT System

In most cases, the mere highlighting of structures is not sufficient for understanding a system. Even with a detailed plan of an oil refinery, it is difficult to understand how oil is converted into gasoline. Only when the process (flow) of refining is explained does it become understandable. Identifying flows is a powerful tool for explaining something. This is also true for models of the IT system. The static view of classes alone is not enough to understand an IT system. For instance, what happens in the IT system when a passenger checks in? Which flows are being processed? Which objects are affected? These questions are answered by the interaction view.

Just as important is the fact that modeling the interaction view contributes much to the verification and completion of the static view. By having to deal with class diagrams from modeling queries to the level of individual attributes, it is ensured that the class diagram...