Swimlanes
Activity diagrams tell you what happens, but they do not tell you who does what. In programming, this means that the diagram does not convey which class is responsible for each activity.
In domain modeling, this means that the diagram does not convey which people or departments are responsible for each activity. One way around this is to label each activity with the responsible class or human. This works, but does not offer the same clarity as interaction diagrams (see Chapter 5) for showing communication among objects.
Swimlanes are a way around this.
To use swimlanes, you must arrange your activity diagrams into vertical zones separated by lines. Each zone represents the responsibilities of a particular class or, in the case of
Get UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
