UML @ Classroom

Abstract

The challenges in today’s software development are diverse and go far beyond implementation tasks. They range from requirement specification over system design and implementation to maintenance and further adaptation of the software—to name just a few phases in the software life cycle. In all of these phases of the software development process, many people with different backgrounds and experiences are usually involved. These people need a common language for efficient communication. Obviously, such a language should be as precise as possible without the ambiguities of a natural language. For this purpose, modeling languages have emerged. They are used to create sketches and blueprints for software systems, which in turn serve as a basis for the implementation or even automatic generation of executable code. In the area of object-oriented software development, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) was able to prevail. Of course, to use the language correctly and efficiently, it is necessary to understand the concepts offered by UML. Since 2006, we have offered the course “Object-Oriented Modeling” at the Vienna University of Technology. This course is mandatory for computer science and business informatics students in their first year. Overall, we have up to 1,000 students per year who attend our course. To deal with such a huge number of students while keeping high quality standards, much effort has been spent on the preparation of such a course. This includes the overall organization, course material, and e-learning support. Parts of the course design have been presented at the Educators’ Symposium of the MODELS conference [8, 9, 10, 11, 7, 46]. We teach the basics of object-oriented modeling by means of UML.