State Machine Diagrams, or Statecharts, are often used more in real-time embedded systems than in information systems, show for a class, the order in which incoming calls to operations normally occur and the conditions under which the operations respond and the response. They are a class-centric view of system functionality, as opposed to sequence and collaboration diagrams which are a use case-centric view of functionality. They include:

	States - oblong boxes which indicate the stable states of the object between events.
	Transitions - the solid arrows which show possible changes of state.
	Events - the text on the transitions before the '/' showing the incoming call to the object interface which causes the change of state.
	Conditions - a boolean statement in square brackets which qualifies the event.
	Actions - the text after the '/' which defines the objects response to the transition between states.
	Extra syntax which defines state-centric functionality