Simplified UML techniques for system development in an educational setting

Software engineering and the design of advanced systems are part of the curriculum of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences during the last two decades. The students are offered a variety of interrelated courses at both under- and postgraduate levels. At its inception, the program opted for procedural software development design. The entire program proved to be suitable for the educational setting at the time but gradually became out dated, prompting redesigning these courses. The new program offers students insight into state-of-the-art design and programming techniques, fundamentals of object-oriented programming Java and UML. However, undergraduate students find it difficult to apply the very abstract and relatively complicated (at least for civil engineers) concepts of UML modelling for real-life software development cases. In order to overcome these problems, the course offered only a subset of the modelling techniques within the available UML editor. The basic idea is that the students only model: (1) a physical object model, (2) user interaction and (3) system response. For this purpose, a simplified modelling methodology is developed, from the UML toolkit that only uses the class diagram and use-case diagram features. We offer other advanced features during postgraduate courses dealing with advanced design systems.