Editing Unified Modeling Language (section)

{{Short description|Software system design modeling tool}}
{{Redirect|UML}}
{{Use American English|date=March 2020}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=September 2020}}
{{Infobox programming language
| name = UML
| logo = UML logo.svg
| family = [[Modeling language]]
| website = {{URL|https://www.uml.org/}}
}}
The '''Unified Modeling Language''' ('''UML''') is a general-purpose visual [[modeling language]] that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system.<ref name="OMG">{{cite book
|title=Unified Modeling Language 2.5.1
|series=[[Object Management Group|OMG]] Document Number formal/2017-12-05
|date=December 2017
|publisher=[[Object Management Group]] Standards Development Organization (OMG SDO)
|url=https://www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.5.1/PDF
}}</ref>

UML provides a standard notation for many types of diagrams which can be roughly divided into three main groups: behavior diagrams, interaction diagrams, and structure diagrams.

The creation of UML was originally motivated by the desire to standardize the disparate notational systems and approaches to software design. It was developed at [[Rational Software]] in 1994–1995, with further development led by them through 1996.<ref name=":1" />

In 1997, UML was adopted as a standard by the [[Object Management Group]] (OMG) and has been managed by this organization ever since. In 2005, UML was also published by the [[International Organization for Standardization]] (ISO) and the [[International Electrotechnical Commission]] (IEC) as the '''ISO/IEC 19501''' standard.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=32620 |title=ISO/IEC 19501:2005 - Information technology - Open Distributed Processing - Unified Modeling Language (UML) Version 1.4.3 |publisher=Iso.org |date=2005-04-01 |access-date=2015-05-07}}</ref> Since then the standard has been periodically revised to cover the latest revision of UML.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=32624 |title=ISO/IEC 19505-1:2012 - Information technology - Object Management Group Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML) - Part 1: Infrastructure |publisher=Iso.org |date=2012-04-20 |access-date=2014-04-10}}</ref>

In software engineering, most practitioners do not use UML, but instead produce informal hand drawn diagrams; these diagrams, however, often include elements from UML.<ref>{{cite book
|author1=Sebastian Baltes
|author2=Stephan Diehl
|title=Proceedings of the 22nd [[ACM SIGSOFT]] International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
|chapter=Sketches and diagrams in practice
|date=2014-11-11
|chapter-url=https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635891
|series=FSE 2014
|publisher=[[Association for Computing Machinery]]
|pages=530–541
|doi=10.1145/2635868.2635891
|isbn=978-1-4503-3056-5
|arxiv=1706.09172
|s2cid=2436333}}</ref>{{Rp|536}}