Be Realistic About the UML: It's Simply Not Sufficient

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) defines the industry standard notation and semantics for properly applying that notation for software built using object-oriented (OO) or component-based technology. In fact it is difficult to find modeling books or tools that do not use the UML these days. The UML provides a common and consistent notation with which to describe OO and component software systems, decreasing the learning curve for developers because they only need to learn the one modeling language (in theory at least). The UML is clearly a step in the right direction, we are no longer fighting the “notation wars” of the mid-1990s, it isn’t perfect. In this article I argue that the UML as it stands today is not sufficient for the development of business software and that the vision of Executable UML is a little (okay, a lot) ahead of its time. Perhaps we should define the modeling languages which we use via open source, not via committee.

Be Realistic About the UML: It's Simply Not Sufficient