Chapter 9. Activity Diagrams

Activity diagrams are one of most unexpected parts of the UML.

Unlike most other techniques in the UML, the activity diagram doesn't have clear origins in the previous works of the three amigos. Rather, the activity diagram combines ideas from several techniques: the event diagrams of Jim Odell, SDL state modeling techniques, workflow modeling, and Petri nets. These diagrams are particularly useful in connection with workflow and in describing behavior that has a lot of parallel processing.

I'm going to describe activity diagrams in more detail than they really warrant in this short book. The reason is that they are one of the least understood areas of the UML, and current UML books are particularly lacking in discussing ...

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