Overview of ArgoUML

1.1. Object Oriented Analysis and Design

Over the past decade, Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOA&D) has become the dominant software development paradigm. With it has come a major shift in the thought processes of all involved in the software development life cycle.

It is the development during the 1990's of tools to support Object Oriented analysis and design that moved this approach into the mainstream. When coupled with the ability to design systems at a very high level, a tool based OOA&D approach has enabled the implementation of more complex systems than previously possible.

The final driver that has propelled OOA&D has been its suitability for modeling graphical user interfaces.The popularity of object based and object oriented graphical languages such as Visual Basic and Java reflect the effectiveness of this approach.

1.2 The Development of ArgoUMLDuring the 1980's a number of OOA&D process methodologies and notations were developed by different research teams. It became clear there were many common themes and, during the 1990's, a unified approach for OOA&D notation was developed under the auspices of the Object Management Group [http://www.omg.org]. This standard became known as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and is now the standard language for communicating OO concepts.

ArgoUML was conceived as a tool and environment for use in the analysis and design of object-oriented software systems. In this sense it is similar to many of the commercial CASE tools that are sold as tools for modeling software systems.

ArgoUML has a number of very important distinctions from many of these tools.

1. It is free.

2. ArgoUML draws on research in cognitive psychology to provide novel features that increase productivity by supporting the cognitive needs of object-oriented software designers and architects.

3. ArgoUML supports open standards extensively - UML, XMI, SVG, OCL and others.

4. ArgoUML is a 100% pure Java application. This allows ArgoUML to run on all platforms for which a reliable port of the Java platform is available.

5. ArgoUML is an open source project. The availability of the source ensures that a new generation of software designers and researchers now have a proven framework from which they can drive the development and evolution of CASE tool technologies.

6. Jason Elliot Robbins founded the Argo Project and provided early project leadership

ArgoUML is a Java based Universal Modeling Language tool. It is able to create and save standard UML diagrams:

Class diagram Usecase diagram Collaboration diagram Deployment diagram Sequence diagram

ArgoUML also has the ability to reverse engineer compiling Java code and generate UML diagrams for it.