Today some evidence arises that UML will more and more be used not as a but as a high level programming language. This has some advantages, as if the… - Bernhard Rumpe

One of the distinct features of XP is the lack of any documentation whatsoever, except for the code itself. This is a contraposition to the modeling techniques like the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which strongly focus on documentation. XP takes an extreme position there, not even documenting the architecture of the system. Often, it is very difficult to extract the overall structure, behavior or interactions with the environment from the code. The code is a rather detailed and fragile representation of the system’s tasks. Even though the code contains all necessary information about the system, this information is often burdened with details and it is tedious to extract the aspects one is interested in. Therefore, it would be useful to have a more compact system representation. The UML does provide a number of notations that are suited for this purpose. However, the tools so far are not capable of supporting UML in such a manner that it can be well-integrated with the approach of Extreme Programming.

Extreme Programming is the most prominent new, light-weight (or agile) methods, defined to contrast the current heavy-weight and partially overloaded object-oriented methods. It focuses on the core issues of software technology. One of its principles is not to rely on diagrams to document a system.

Advances in hardware and network technologies have paved the way for the development of increasingly pervasive software-based that collaborate to provide essential services to society. Software in these systems is often required to (1) operate in distributed and embedded computing environments consisting of diverse devices (personal computers, specialized sensors and actuators), (2) communicate using a variety of interaction paradigms (e.g., SOAP messaging, media streaming), (3) dynamically adapt to changes in operating environments, and (4) behave in a dependable manner. Despite significant advances in programming languages and supporting integrated development environments (IDEs), developing these complex software systems using current code-centric technologies requires herculean effort.