When to Use Activity Diagrams

Like most behavioral modeling techniques, activity diagrams have definite strengths and
weaknesses, so they are best used in combination with other techniques.
The great strength of activity diagrams lies in the fact that they support and encourage
parallel behavior. This makes them a great tool for workflow modeling and, in principle, for
multithreaded programming. Their great disadvantage is that they do not make the links
among actions and objects very clear.
You can define a link to an object by labeling an activity with an object name or by using
swimlanes, which divide an activity diagram based on responsibilities, but this does not
have the simple immediacy of interaction diagrams (see Chapter 5). For this reason, some
people feel that using activity diagrams is not object-oriented and, thus, bad. I've found that
the technique can be very useful, and I don't throw useful tools out of my toolkit.