http://forums.visual-paradigm.com/posts/9.html JForum - http://www.jforum.net First time here. I'm Andrea, SE student at Genoa University (Italy).
I'm preparing to attend a Software Engineering exam, and one main requisite is that we're able to use and manage UML diagrams.
I've got a simple (i hope) question for you, which's making me trouble: How shall I decide wether to use Activity or Sequence or State Machine diagrams to model something?
I mean, I know each diagram characteristics, but I feel like they're quite similar, and are able to express same concepts.

I hope someone will suggest me some kind of criteria to decide (eg: model the 'typical life' of an object, model some sort of interaction between different objects, etc.)

Thanks everybody who's going to reply something.]]> http://forums.visual-paradigm.com/posts/2840#21255.html http://forums.visual-paradigm.com/posts/2840#21255.html http://forums.visual-paradigm.com/posts/2840#21264.html http://forums.visual-paradigm.com/posts/2840#21264.html
I find that sequence diagrams require you to describe the interactions between components that you haven't designed yet. So, they eventually will be valuable, but I think they describe "how does the system perform the operations defined in the activity diagram".

Another aspect I observed is that UML modeling is extremely iterative. Ideas are proposed, tested, and refined.

I would appreciate other's feedback as well. Hope your exams went well.]]> http://forums.visual-paradigm.com/posts/2840#24241.html http://forums.visual-paradigm.com/posts/2840#24241.html