Fundamentals of UML Diagrams

Component Diagrams

A component diagram is similar to the package diagram. It works in the same way as the package diagram, showing the organizations and dependencies among a set of components. Component diagrams address the static implementation view of a system. Component diagrams emphasize the physical software entity e.g. files headers, executables, link-libraries etc, rather than the logical partitioning of the package diagram. It is based heavily on the package diagram, but has added ".dll" to handle I/O, and has added a test harness executable. Not heavily used, but can be helpful in mapping the physical, real life software code and dependencies between them. Figure 2.14 shows a symbol used for a software component.

Figure 2.14: A Symbol for a Software Component