UML has been around since 1997. To determine how it?s being used in current software architecting and design, the authors surveyed practitioners and analyzed case studies of industry projects. Their results show that UML is used rather loosely and that UML models are often incomplete. This leads to miscommunication and other implementation and maintenance problems. The authors conclude with recommendations and techniques for controlling UML model quality.
This article is part of a focus section on software architecture.