UML stands for Unified Modeling Language.

It's an international industry standard

graphical notation used for describing, visualizing, constructing and documenting
the artifacts of a software system.
These diagrams are organized into two distinct groups: structural diagrams and
behavioral or interaction diagrams.
 Class diagram
Structural UML diagrams
 Package diagram
 Object diagram
 Component diagram
 Composite structure diagram
 Deployment diagram

Behavioral UML diagrams  Activity diagram

 Sequence diagram
 Use case diagram
 State diagram
 Communication diagram
 Interaction overview diagram
 Timing diagram

Behavioral UML diagrams:

1) UML Use Case Diagram

Purpose

Use case diagram is used during the analysis phase of a project to identify the
system functionality. It describes the interaction of people or external device with
the system under design. It doesn't show much detail, but only summarizes some of
the relationships between use cases, actors, and systems.

2) UML Sequence Diagram

Purpose

Sequence diagrams are used in the analysis and design phases. It's an interaction
diagram that details how operations are carried out. Sequence diagram is often
used to depict the chronologically-structured event flow through a use case. It's
good at presenting the communication relationships between objects; and what
messages trigger those communications.

3) UML Activity Diagram

Purpose

The purpose of activity diagram is to describe the procedural flow of actions as

part of a larger activity. It is used to model how activities are coordinated to
provide a service; to show the events needed to achieve some operation, and to
illustrate how the events in a single use case relate to one another.

4) UML State Diagram

Purpose

The primary purpose of a statechart diagram is to model interactive systems and

define each and every state of an object. Statechart diagrams are designed to
capture the dynamic behavior of an application system. These diagrams are used to
represent various states of a system and entities within the system.
5) UML Communication diagram

Purpose

A communication diagram is an extension of object diagram that shows the objects

along with the messages that travel from one to another. communication
diagrams are used by designers to define and clarify the roles of the objects that
perform a particular flow of events of a use case.

6) UML Interaction overview diagram

Purpose

Interaction overview diagrams focus on the overview of the flow of control where

the nodes are interactions (sd) or interaction use (ref). The other notation elements
for interaction overview diagrams are the same as for activity and
sequence diagrams. These include initial, final, decision, merge, fork and join
nodes.

7) UML Timing diagram

Purpose

Timing diagram is used to show interactions when a primary purpose of

the diagram is to reason about time; it focuses on conditions changing within and
among lifelines along a linear time axis. Timing diagram is a special form of a
sequence diagram.

Structural UML diagrams:

1) UML Component Diagram

Purpose

It allows application designers to verify that a system's required functionality is

being implemented by components, thus ensuring that the final system will be
acceptable. What's more, component diagram is useful communication tool among
stakeholders to discuss, analyze or improve a system design.

2) UML Deployment Diagram

Purpose

Deployment diagram is used to describe the hardware components used in system

implementations and the execution environments and artifacts deployed on the
hardware. It's used to visualize the hardware topology system, model physical
hardware elements and the communication relationship between them, and plan the
architecture of the system.
 3) UML Package Diagram

Purpose

Package diagrams are used to organize the elements of a model. They are typically
used to depict the high-level organization of a software project. Package diagram
can show both structure and dependencies between sub-systems or modules. They
can be used to group any construct in the UML such as classes, actors, and use
cases.

4) UML Class Diagram

Purpose

A UML class diagram is not only used to describe the object and information
structures in an application, but also show the communication with its users. It
provides a wide range of usages; from modeling the static view of an application to
describing responsibilities for a system. Composition is a special type of
aggregation that denotes a strong ownership.

5) UML Composite structure diagram

Purpose

In UML models, a composite structure diagram depicts the internal structure of

structured classifiers by using parts, ports, and connectors. A structured classifier
defines the implementation of a classifier and can include a class, a component, or
a deployment node. You can use the composite structure diagram to show the
internal details of a classifier and to describe the objects and roles that work
together to perform the behavior of the containing classifier.

6) UML Object diagram

Purpose

During the analysis phase of a project, you might create a class diagram to describe
the structure of a system and then create a set of object diagrams as test cases
to.verify the accuracy and completeness of the class diagram.Object diagrams are
used to render a set of objects and their relationships as an instance.