[UML]2-History

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History

History of object-oriented methods and notation.

UML has been evolving since the second half of the 1990s and has its roots in the object-oriented methods developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The timeline (see image) shows the highlight of the history of object-oriented modeling methods and notation.

Before UML 1.x

After Rational Software Corporation hired James Rumbaugh from General Electric in 1994, the company became the source for two of the most popular object-oriented modeling approaches of the day:^[5]Rumbaugh's Object-modeling technique (OMT) and Grady Booch's method known as Object-oriented design(OOD). They were soon assisted in their efforts by Ivar Jacobson, the creator of the object-oriented software engineering (OOSE) method. Jacobson joined Rational in 1995, after his company, Objectory AB,^[6] was acquired by Rational. The three methodologists were collectively referred to as the Three Amigos.

In 1996, Rational concluded that the abundance of modeling languages was slowing the adoption of object technology,^{[citation needed]} so repositioning the work on a unified method, they tasked the "Three Amigos" with the development of a non-proprietary Unified Modeling Language. Representatives of competing object technology companies were consulted during OOPSLA '96;^{[citation needed]} they chose boxes for representing classes rather than the cloudsymbols that were used in Booch's notation.

Under the technical leadership of the "Three Amigos", an international consortium called the UML Partners was organized in 1996 to complete the Unified Modeling Language (UML) specification, and propose it as a response to the OMG RFP. The UML Partners' UML 1.0 specification draft was proposed to the OMG in January 1997. During the same month the UML Partners formed a Semantics Task Force, chaired by Cris Kobryn and administered by Ed Eykholt, to finalize the semantics of the specification and integrate it with other standardization efforts. The result of this work, UML 1.1, was submitted to the OMG in August 1997 and adopted by the OMG in November 1997.^[7]

UML 1.x

As a modeling notation, the influence of the OMT notation dominates (e. g., using rectangles for classes and objects). Though the Booch "cloud" notation was dropped, the Booch capability to specify lower-level design detail was embraced. The use case notation from Objectory and the component notation from Booch were integrated with the rest of the notation, but the semantic integration was relatively weak in UML 1.1, and was not really fixed until the UML 2.0 major revision.^{[citation needed]}

Concepts from many other OO methods were also loosely integrated with UML with the intent that UML would support all OO methods. Many others also contributed, with their approaches flavouring the many models of the day, including: Tony Wasserman and Peter Pircher with the "Object-Oriented Structured Design (OOSD)" notation (not a method), Ray Buhr's "Systems Design with Ada", Archie Bowen's use case and timing analysis, Paul Ward's data analysis and David Harel's "Statecharts"; as the group tried to ensure broad coverage in the real-time systems domain. As a result, UML is useful in a variety of engineering problems, from single process, single user applications to concurrent, distributed systems, making UML rich but also large.

The Unified Modeling Language is an international standard:

ISO/IEC 19501:2005 Information technology – Open Distributed Processing – Unified Modeling Language (UML) Version 1.4.2

UML 2.x

UML has matured significantly since UML 1.1. Several minor revisions (UML 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5) fixed shortcomings and bugs with the first version of UML, followed by the UML 2.0 major revision that was adopted by the OMG in 2005.^[8]

Although UML 2.1 was never released as a formal specification, versions 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 appeared in 2007, followed by UML 2.2 in February 2009. UML 2.3 was formally released in May 2010.^[9] UML 2.4.1 was formally released in August 2011.^[10] UML 2.5 was released in October 2012 as an "In process" version and has yet to become formally released. ^[11]

There are four parts to the UML 2.x specification:

1. The Superstructure that defines the notation and semantics for diagrams and their model elements
2. The Infrastructure that defines the core metamodel on which the Superstructure is based
3. The Object Constraint Language (OCL) for defining rules for model elements
4. The UML Diagram Interchange that defines how UML 2 diagram layouts are exchanged

The current versions of these standards follow: UML Superstructure version 2.4.1, UML Infrastructure version 2.4.1, OCL version 2.3.1, and UML Diagram Interchange version 1.0.^[12]

Although many UML tools support some of the new features of UML 2.x, the OMG provides no test suite to objectively test compliance with its specifications.