UML for the Software Developer, Part 2: Mastering Associations
Associations are a key part of the UML lexicon. Use them to define the ways in which your application's classes communicate. In this article you'll see that adding a database introduces design patterns for the first time using the façade pattern.
by Mark Goetsch
January 4, 2005
lasses are only the first step to understanding UML. In my last article I discussed classes in UML and how they are coded using C#. In this article I will tie-up a few loose ends by describing how classes are arrived at and then march into how they relate to each other in UML using associations.
Setting the Stage with a Story
In software development methodology, stories are often used as a software metaphor; they are a narrative that is used to represent a conversation between the developer(s) and the customer. Stories owe their popularity to Extreme Programming and can be used as the basis for building UML classes and explaining how they relate. When using a story as the basis of your system, the first step is to convert the nouns in the story into UML classes. This will give scope to the system. As the story expands to include other stories, the new stories will map into different namespaces, each with its own scope.
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lasses are only the first step to understanding UML. In my 
