The 4+1 View Model

Throughout all of the courses that our degree goes over, I believe that we actually go through a significant amount of theory about the UML, with its many methods and diagrams.  (the diagrams are the things that stick with me the most because their visual nature). From what I can remember, we did not actually go over a model (such as the one presented) that would integrated all these different tools. We kind of saw the UML as a toolset, went over every tool in detail, learnt what they did, but never actually covered a method that would bring them all together.

I'll start out by saying that there is a particular thing that I really appreciated about this video explanation: It brings together a bunch of UML tools that I knew about but never looked at in that context. When the presenter argues that certain diagrams or documents (the tools) cover certain 'views' of a project, the presenter helps me make sense of them, it makes them look more obviously useful as a part of a whole, not as isolated tools.

But, what bothers me a bit about the explanation is that I don't actually know if this view model came about to try to make sense of all the different assets offered by the Unified Modeling Language or if it was the other way around. I looked it up and I was happy to find out that the 4+1 view model is generic and does not actually require the use of any particular language or notation. So it was the presenter that was fitting the UML tools into the view model. This is important to me because the view model would have made less sense to me if it existed as a way to fit UML tools into a process. I can rest easy now. Now I'd want to find out if there are other view models for software architecture out there that might make even more sense to me, but that'd be a story for another time.