UML Weekend Crash Course™ - To Parent Directory

Session 15—Applying the Activity Diagram to the Case Study 163
Now you have all the pieces you need to do a bit of organizing. One opportunity to
watch for is concurrency. Identify tasks that may be done at the same time because they
don’t depend on one another. For example, Figure 15-6 shows that notifying accounts
payable and updating inventory don’t overlap or depend on one another so they can be
modeled as concurrent activities. Use the fork bar to show that you want to follow both
logical paths at the same time. Use the synchronization bar to show that you’re done with
the concurrent tasks and want to continue on a single logical path. In this example, after
all the updates and notifications are done, you can print the confirmation.
Notify Accounts
Payable of the
updated
Purchase Order
Update
inventory for the
Products received
Display the
"Accounts
Payable notified"
message
Display "inventory
updated
successfully"
message
Print the
receiving
confirmation
done
Figure 15-6 Modeling the concurrency opportunity
Figure 15-7 puts all the segments together. Notice in the bottom left below the activity
labeled “Display “invalid item” error message” I added another merge point to bring
together the segments from Figures 15-4 and 15-5.