Common Mechanisms of UML

Common Modeling Techniques:

Modeling the Vocabulary of a System 

To model the vocabulary of a system: 

• Recognize the things that users or implementer's use to describe the problem or solution 
• Use Class Responsibility Collaboration (CRC) cards and use case based analysis to find out these abstractions, which typically become classes in the model 
• Identify a set of responsibilities for each abstraction 
• Ensure that each class is well defined and there exists a reasonably good balance of responsibilities among all classes 
• Include the attributes and operations that are necessary to fulfill the responsibilities for each class

Modeling Non Software Things

To model non-software things:

• Model the things that need to be abstracted as a class
• If these are different from UML’s standard building blocks, then stereotypes are used to create new building blocks
• Use nodes for modeling hardware things

Modeling the Distribution of Responsibilities in a System

To model the distribution of responsibilities in a system:

• Find out the classes that work together to carry out a required behavior and identify their respective responsibilities
• Divide the classes that have too many responsibilities into smaller ones. Merge the classes that have very few responsibilities
• Consider collaboration among classes to redistribute responsibilities
• Model the things that need to be abstracted as classes

Modeling Primitive Types

To model primitive types:

• Model the thing that needs to be abstracted as a class or an enumeration. It is then rendered using a class notation

• Specify the range of values associated with this type, use constraints

Classes at Glance