Resumen
The article presents information on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The UML is a graphical language for visualizing, documenting the artifacts of a software-intensive system. The UML was adopted as a standard by the Object Management Group (OMG) in November 1997 and now serves as the standard language of blueprints for software. As such, the UML has found widespread use, it has been applied successfully to build systems for tasks as diverse as e-commerce, command and control, computer games, and others. The UML had its beginnings in the late 1980s. Faced with a new genre of object-oriented programming languages and increasingly complex applications, methodologists began to experiment with alternative approaches to analysis and design. The number of OO methods increased from fewer than 10 to more than 50 between 1989 and 1994. Many users of these methods had trouble finding a modeling language that met their needs completely, thus fueling the so-called method wars. From hard real-time systems to e-business and virtually everything in between, the UML has become part of the mainstream of software development, enabling teams to reconcile and coordinate the needs of various stakeholders, to gain control of their systems' architecture, and to manage complexity.