Overview

This chapter provides an essential and practical tool-, process-, and technology-independent approach, as a roadmap, for effectively and successfully applying the UML. The roadmap demonstrates how the elements of the UML are holistically and cohesively integrated, how the UML supports traceability throughout the system development lifecycle process, and how the UML scales. Our goal, in this chapter, is to gain an overview of the roadmap by conglomerating the contents of Chapters 2 and 3. Use this overview chapter as a launching point into the detailed Chapters 5-9.

The roadmap is derived by exploring the UML sentence, establishing a roadmap space, defining a general roadmap, elaborating a detailed roadmap, and specifying a notational roadmap.

The UML sentence conglomerates the key concepts of the UML as discussed in Chapter 2. The roadmap space provides a context for the roadmap, including the decision points (or critical points within an effort at which decisions must be made) and their relationships using the modeling mechanisms as discussed in Chapter 2. The general roadmap relates the process disciplines of context modeling, requirements, analysis, design, implementation, validation, and deployment as discussed in Chapter 2 to the roadmap space.

The detailed roadmap provides general guidance, including what to model and why, for each point across the roadmap space. The notational roadmap provides notational guidance, including how to model various aspects of a system, as a society of elements, for each point across the roadmap space using the foundational structural and behavioral concepts of the object-oriented paradigm and...