TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter provides essential rules, principles, and style guidelines for composing UML structural or static models within the context of the roadmap, including class and object diagrams and their elements. Structural modeling is concerned with modeling the structural or static dimension of a system the elements and their relationships that constitute a system and is used for system, subsystem, and class specification within the roadmap to capture in a specification model how the construct will satisfy its requirements. Structural modeling is also used to determine which elements and their relationships collaborate to constitute the construct, and how these elements interact to provide functionality to end users. A specification model consists of class, object, sequence, collaboration, state, and activity diagrams and their model elements. Our goal, in this chapter, is to gain more depth in understanding the UML notation and the roadmap concerning the structural or static aspect of specification models.
A class diagram depicts the static structure of an entity using classifiers and relationships. An entity is a classifier, for example, a system, subsystem, or class.
A classifier is a concept that defines structural features and behavioral features, and has various types of relationships. A feature is a property encapsulated within a model element, an atomic constituent of a model. Structural features define the static features of a model element. Behavioral features define the dynamic features of a model element. A classifier may contain other classifiers. It owns its contents and defines a namespace, a part...
