When to Use Activity Diagrams
Like most behavioral modeling techniques, activity diagrams have definite strengths and weaknesses, so they are best used in combination with other techniques.
The great strength of activity diagrams lies in the fact that they support and encourage parallel behavior. This makes them a great tool for workflow modeling and, in principle, for multithreaded programming. Their great disadvantage is that they do not make the links among actions and objects very clear.
You can define a link to an object by labeling an activity with an object name or by using swimlanes, which divide an activity diagram based on responsibilities, but this does not have the simple immediacy of interaction diagrams (see Chapter 5). For this ...
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.
