- Unified Modeling Language is OMG’s most-used specification
- Graphical language for visualisation, specification, design and documentation of SW systems
Strengths
- It covers entire SW development lifecycle with a lot of diagrams that are divided into two main groups:
- Structure diagrams
- Behaviour (and interaction) diagrams
- There are many CASE tools with UML support
- It allows to extend notation via stereotypes, but it can turn into disadvantage
- UML is used in the vast majority of SW projects
Weaknesses
- It uses a relatively small number of different graphic elements to express a large number of different concepts
- Different things in the diagram that mean something very different look the same except for use of stereotypes
- It is not suitable for conceptual modeling of business domains (although it is often used)
More at uml.org, uml-diagrams.org or wikipedia