Dependency

Dependency is one of the most generic types of UML relationship. It is used to define that one class depends in some way or other on another class, while the other class may or may not depend on the first one. A dependent relationship is used to represent relations that do not fall into one of the cases described in the following sections. Dependency is sometimes called Uses-A relationship.

In general, in object-oriented programming languages dependency is used to describe whether one class contains a parameter of the second class in the signature of a method, or whether it creates instances of the second class by passing them to other classes without using them (without invoking its methods):