I think Martin Fowler’s “UML Distilled” is the best book for learning UML syntax. It’s succinct and dense with information. Unfortunately, knowing UML syntax well is not the same thing as knowing how to design.
As stated in another answer, an actor is a system or role interacting with the system under development. You should include a system as an actor in a use case if it is outside the system you are developing, and if it directly interacts with the system you are developing. This is important because you … Read more
Probably the closest thing is the activity diagram. It’s not quite the same; more influenced by flow chart than dfd. However: you can do some of the useful things in DFDs, e.g. ADs do support concurrency and differentiate control flow from dataflow. More details on comparisons & differences in this question. [fwiw, I still use … Read more
You are correct: there is no need to include the (noise of) “boilerplate” signatures of standard setters and getters in a class model. Unfortunately, UML does not define a standard notation for implying getters and setters for private attributes. So, you’d have to use your own convention. For instance, you could include a general explanation … Read more
It might seems so, but the difference is, activity diagrams describe activities and state charts describe states. So those models are orthogonal – you might imagine there is an activity between two states (something that occurs during the transition) and you might say there is a state between two activities. This is rather a simplification, … Read more
You have to write the class name in italic : Here Contexte is an abstract class and Structure is a “concrete” class P. 99 of the specs says: The name of an abstract Classifier is shown in italics, where permitted by the font in use. Alternatively or in addition, an abstract Classifier may be shown … Read more
UPDATES Aug.08.2019 From Rotsiser’s comment, by combining changing the length of lines with together keyword, it can align elements @startuml class A A ..> B C —> B D …> B together { class E class F class G } E —-> B @enduml OUTDATED You are able to align elements by changing the number … Read more
I have another idea. I think we should look in-depth. When we are talking about ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram), we are talking about Entity Relationship Modeling. It is firstly introduced by Peter Chen (1976). He has two famous articles on Entity Relationship Modeling (see first and second articles) He talked about Entity-Relationship Modeling (not Entity-Relationship … Read more
There are some tricks that you can try, listed below. The layouting itself is performed by GraphViz (dot layouting iirc), and GraphViz simply does this sometimes. Graph layouting is a NP-complete problem, so algorithms usually take harsh shortcuts. Typical workarounds that I’ve seen or used include: adding hidden lines a -[hidden]- b extending the length … Read more
Rumbaugh’s statement is the most telling and Uncle Bob’s good advice. As I’ve said elsewhere, Aggregation is semantically so weak as to offer nothing practically beneficial. It only has one valid corner case (acyclicity of recursive relationships) however few people know and understand that. So you end up having to point out in comments anyway. … Read more