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Historical Questions


UML History - How it all got started?

I am sure all three of us -- Grady, Jim and I -- have different recollections of how it all started.
I wrote a guest editorial in Journal of Object-Oriented Programming in June 1993 in which I outlined how standardization could happen.

This guest editorial triggered Grady Booch to call me and ask when we would go ahead and start the work. Grady and I met with Jim Rumbaugh at a breakfast meeting at OOPSLA’93 (I think) and tried to get to some outline of work. Not much happened until Jim joined Rational a year later. Grady and Jim announced that they would work on a Unified Method which was both modeling language and process. I felt that was too much, that it would be better to first work on the language part.

Late 1994, senior executive managers at Ericsson asked me to try to get OMG to standardize on modeling languages. The reason was that Ericsson invested so much in using different modeling techniques like the Objectory approach and wanted to get a standard, a standard that was supported by many vendors.

I contacted Richard Soley, whom I knew from my time at MIT in 1983-84, and suggested that OMG would take on the effort of standardizing a modeling language. Richard asked me to get as many other methodologists to support this idea and in particular Grady and Jim.

Early 1995, I wrote a lot of emails to all my friends in the methodology field. Everyone of them was positive to the effort. I also talked to Grady and Jim. And their managers! Eventually we all agreed that a standardization effort should be supported by OMG. This is how the whole work on standardizing UML started.