1 ER 2005 – Tutorial 8 UML 2 – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Eight years after its standardization in 1997, UML has been accepted world wide as the »lingua franca « in software modeling for both developers and customers. This success of a single modeling language allows for an effective and efficient communication about software models, thus preventing unfruitful discussions concerning the meaning of certain graphical symbols such as circles or »crows feet « formerly used in different modeling notations. UML in the current version 2.0 goes one step further promising, among others, to provide a basis for model-driven development and (semi-) automatic code generation. Objective The objective of this tutorial is to give insights into the major changes of the new UML2 standard by pointing out improvements, reporting shortcomings, and discussing flaws. This tutorial will allow the participants to obtain a big picture of the goals and overall changes of UML 2 grasp origin, purpose and usage areas of new diagram types and language concepts for structural and behavioural modeling assess the potential of UML 2, thus facilitating the process of migrating to UML 2 get familiar with the new underlying language architecture and the changes concerning its extension mechanisms and meta modeling capabilities gain insight into the potential and limits of model-driven software development on the basis o