Developing with UML - Goodies, Pitfalls, Workarounds

. The object-oriented modeling language UML offers various notations for all phases of application development. The user is left alone, however, when applying UML in up-to-date application development involving distribution, data management, and component-oriented mechanisms. Moreover, various shortcomings have been encountered, most notably w.r.t. refinement of model elements throughout the development life cycle and employment of interaction diagrams to formalize use cases. The paper will shed some light on how these issues may be handled with UML. 1 Introduction "When it comes down to it, the real point of software development is cutting code. Diagrams are, after all, just pretty pictures." [4, p.7] This opinion is still alive among researchers working in the area of software development as well as practitioners involved in software projects. Nonetheless, it has been more and more commonly accepted that the early phases of software development such as requirements specification, an..