Anyone using UML?
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Anyone out there using UML? If so, what do you think of it? Is it worth the time and effort learning the tools and getting everyone trained in UML-speak? Are the tools from Rational Rose worth their cost for medium sized projects that need lots of tracking and documentation? Are there better tools / methods out there? The reason I'm asking is that I would like a project that's starting to use some type of modern design and documentation tools. Is UML the way to go?
I don't know. I'd sure like to hear a good answer on this myself though... from the little i know of UML, it sounds like a great first-step design tool, but i can't imagine using it beyond the design of initial code structure. Also, I'm fairly pissed off at Rational currently, so the thought of paying major $$ for the toolset is a huge turn-off. :(
---------------- Shog9 ---------------- ------- Drink Coca-Cola ------- ---- Use SciTE ----
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Anyone out there using UML? If so, what do you think of it? Is it worth the time and effort learning the tools and getting everyone trained in UML-speak? Are the tools from Rational Rose worth their cost for medium sized projects that need lots of tracking and documentation? Are there better tools / methods out there? The reason I'm asking is that I would like a project that's starting to use some type of modern design and documentation tools. Is UML the way to go?
Stuart van Weele wrote: Is it worth the time and effort learning the tools and getting everyone trained in UML-speak? Absoloutely. UML is great for any type of project. What's great about it is that it gets everyone onto the same playing field: everyone speaks the same language and can express themselves using standardized diagrams and notations. It helps developers stick to the fundamentals while helping architects and designers flesh out the details. Coupled with a process like the Rational Unified Process (there are many processes around), you get a great foramework. Stuart van Weele wrote: Rational Rose worth their cost for medium sized projects that need lots of tracking and documentation I didn't like Rational Rose at first - now it is almost all I use for UML. I like Visio too, but Rational Rose wins (for me) in terms of the C++ code it generates. It is expensive, so Visio is a good alternative that's catching up quickly. All the best, Erik Westermann Author, Learn XML In A Weekend (October 2002)
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IMHO, UML is probably the way to go, especially if you are using a OO Programing language. Some applications will auto-generate skeleton code for you based off your class diagrams. I think that UML allows a developer to catch mistakes early in the software development lifecycle, as opposed to the latter stages, which would cost a bunch in time and resources. I am pretty sure Visio supports UML and code generation, not sure about Ratinoal's tools, they are probably more flexible, but also more expensive.
Soliant | email "the result is that VC7 is the only compiler to generate optimized MSIL" - Stanley Lippman
Soliant wrote: I am pretty sure Visio supports UML and code generation I couldn't get Visio to reverse engineer or generate code when I tried with VS.NET a while back. Anybody else get it to work? Andy Cowenhoven
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Anyone out there using UML? If so, what do you think of it? Is it worth the time and effort learning the tools and getting everyone trained in UML-speak? Are the tools from Rational Rose worth their cost for medium sized projects that need lots of tracking and documentation? Are there better tools / methods out there? The reason I'm asking is that I would like a project that's starting to use some type of modern design and documentation tools. Is UML the way to go?
Another package to look at is Argouml http://argouml.tigris.org/[^] I had a bit of play with it some time back and was reasonably impressed. That said I'm not into UML even though I probably should be. Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows. www.getsoft.com
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Stuart van Weele wrote: Is it worth the time and effort learning the tools and getting everyone trained in UML-speak? Absoloutely. UML is great for any type of project. What's great about it is that it gets everyone onto the same playing field: everyone speaks the same language and can express themselves using standardized diagrams and notations. It helps developers stick to the fundamentals while helping architects and designers flesh out the details. Coupled with a process like the Rational Unified Process (there are many processes around), you get a great foramework. Stuart van Weele wrote: Rational Rose worth their cost for medium sized projects that need lots of tracking and documentation I didn't like Rational Rose at first - now it is almost all I use for UML. I like Visio too, but Rational Rose wins (for me) in terms of the C++ code it generates. It is expensive, so Visio is a good alternative that's catching up quickly. All the best, Erik Westermann Author, Learn XML In A Weekend (October 2002)
My two cents: Every time I look at Rational Rose I come up with the following: I can't justify the cost: 1. of the product 2. of the learning curve for UML 3. of learning Rational Rose (which, every time I look at it, never makes any sense to me) 4. of maintaining the documentation. That said, keep in mind that I'm a consultant and the projects I work on are usually one-man projects (although also usually fairly large). If you want to use Rational Rose and UML for your documentation, make sure your management is 110% behind you, because you will need that support to when it comes time to pay the bills. (In my case, my management, me, is not 110% behind me!) Marc
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Soliant wrote: I am pretty sure Visio supports UML and code generation I couldn't get Visio to reverse engineer or generate code when I tried with VS.NET a while back. Anybody else get it to work? Andy Cowenhoven
Andy Cowenhoven wrote: Visio to reverse engineer or generate code when I tried with VS.NET Well you need Visio 2002 and there was supposed to be a service pack released for VS.NET. That is what Microsoft's website said.
Soliant | email "the result is that VC7 is the only compiler to generate optimized MSIL" - Stanley Lippman
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Anyone out there using UML? If so, what do you think of it? Is it worth the time and effort learning the tools and getting everyone trained in UML-speak? Are the tools from Rational Rose worth their cost for medium sized projects that need lots of tracking and documentation? Are there better tools / methods out there? The reason I'm asking is that I would like a project that's starting to use some type of modern design and documentation tools. Is UML the way to go?
UML is, like it or not, the industry standard, mostly because of its esteemed authors and because of its association with Rose. Jacobson compiled a vast amount of object oriented wisdom into his book "Object Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach". Most people who've read this book just don't appreciate how much Jacobson knew, even back in the early days of OO. FOr instance, he picked up on the notion of Patterns several years before they became the in-vogue fashion. Rumbaugh provided more 'how to' information at the analytic level and was particularly good at data and association modelling. I particularly liked his proposal that object associations are themselves objects. I must admit I liked his notation a whole lot, and used it for several years. Booch was into design-time data and process flows, run-time modelling techniques such as sequence diagrams etc.. I suspect most coding engineers relate more to Booch than either Jacobson or Rumbaugh, however top-down designers might lean more towards the other two. Anyhow, I digress, UML is their collective brainchild, and it embodies many of their ideas, and the ideas percolating through the industry. I'm not convinced this is a case where the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. UML is a bit of a dogs breakfast, but it is the industry standard. Point is, you NEED to know it if you want to get into anything more than cutting low level code. Especially if you get into business programming. As a notation it is reasonably expressive and covers a lot of situations from business to telecoms to missile systems. Rational Rose? We used Rose purely as a documentation tool because we started with an existing code base. They have add-ons for creating and managing documents in Word too. It has good drill-down capabilities and the repository capabilities and multi-user version control that you would expect. Licensing allowed a certain number of users on-line at any given moment and, when used mostly for documentation, this can turn out to be quite a good deal. We evaluated many tools other than Rational, but after using it for several years now, we've had no need to look for a replacement. To be honest I don't actually design anything with Rational Rose, because that still gets down with whiteboards, CRC cards etc.. But it does an entirely acceptable job of documenting. At home, because I cannot afford Rational myself, I have to employ Visio Professional / Scientific. This works quite well too, but not as
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Check out Enterprise Architect at www.sparxsystems.com.au. Phil Boyd MCP CPT, AR You may be gone, but we will never forget your sacrifice. "Proud to be an American..." Lee Greenwood
Wow. Thanks for that link. Can't beat their price. How do they manage that? Marc
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Wow. Thanks for that link. Can't beat their price. How do they manage that? Marc
That I don't know. But I like the tool immensely. Geoff and Scott are very active on their forum. Also they respond very quickly to feature requests and bug reports (typically an update within 2-3 weeks). Try to get anyone from Rational to do that. Phil Boyd MCP CPT, AR You may be gone, but we will never forget your sacrifice. "Proud to be an American..." Lee Greenwood
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Check out Enterprise Architect at www.sparxsystems.com.au. Phil Boyd MCP CPT, AR You may be gone, but we will never forget your sacrifice. "Proud to be an American..." Lee Greenwood
Thanks, I just got the 30 day trial version