And There's More

I should stress that this chapter only scratches the surface on activity diagrams. As with so much of the UML, you could write a whole book on this one technique alone. Indeed, I think that activity diagrams would make a very suitable topic for a book that really dug into the notation and how to use it.

The vital question is how widely they get used. Activity diagrams aren't the most widely used UML technique at the moment, and their flow-modeling progenitors weren't very popular either. Diagrammatic techniques haven't yet caught on much for describing behavior in this kind of way. On the other hand, there are signs in a number of communities of a pent-up demand that a standard technique will help to satisfy.