Activity (Software Engineering) Information
Activity diagrams are graphical representations of workflows of stepwise activities and actions with support for choice, iteration and concurrency.[1] In the Unified Modeling Language, activity diagrams can be used to describe the business and operational step-by-step workflows of components in a system. An activity diagram shows the overall flow of control.
Contents |
Construction
Activity diagrams are constructed from a limited set of building blocks consisting of nodes, activities, and decisions. Although superficially similar to conventional flowcharts, activity diagrams also allow concurrent activities to be modeled.
The starting point of the diagram is the initial node, which is usually positioned at the top of the diagram, or on the left. The process or workflow being modeled ends when the final node, usually positioned at the bottom or on the right, is reached. Between the initial and final nodes there can be zero, one, or more activities, represented by rounded rectangles. The activities are connected by directed arrows, which represent the transition from one activity to the next.
Applications
In SysML the activity diagram has been extended to indicate flows among steps that convey physical matter (e.g., gasoline) or energy (e.g., torque, pressure). Additional changes allow the diagram to better support continuous behaviors and continuous data flows.
In UML 1.x, an activity diagram is a variation of the UML State diagram in which the "states" represent activities, and the transitions represent the completion of those activities.
See also
- Control flow graph
- Data flow diagram
- Event-driven process chain
- Petri net
- State diagram
- Pseudocode
- Business Process Modeling Notation
References
- ^ Glossary of Key Terms at McGraw-hill.com. Retrieved 20 July 2008.
External links
| Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Activity diagrams |
| This software engineering-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Categories: UML diagrams | SysML |
|
)