On Tuesday 12 July 2005 10:20 pm, Hasan A. Khan scribbled:
> Hi,
> I disagree with PicDudes comments about UML.  I have
> used it extensively in my previous life as a C++/Java
> Developer.  ...

Sure, but stepping outside of that little bubble and looking at the bigger 
picture from a project manager's perspective, it can certainly dig into a 
project budget fast.  Sure it is a good tool and works well for it's intended 
purpose, but my comments were directed towards whether it is worth it or not.  
In my experience, in the real world, most of the time the documentation is 
not used in the future, due to other changes, newer systems leading to 
re-development in other languages, lack of following up on the documentation 
after other changes are made (making them untrustable), and just that 
developers generally don't like reading docs to understand what was 
previously intended, but rather prefer to read comments in code and figure it 
out from there.  For any project that has large development cycles, it 
becomes more useful to put everyone and all modules in sync/understanding 
prior to start of development, hence my comment that it's more useful on 
those projects.  That's my experience as a PM in the real world.  I had also 
used it as a developer prior to that on Smalltalk and Java projects.


> ...  You
> could misuse any tool and over do it.

Agreed, but I made an assumption that if you're using UML, then you're using 
the the bulk of the power of it.


> I am a beginner in the field of electronics and
> microcontroller hardware design and have not written
> any programs large enough to justify UML but I can
> easily imagine larger programs written in C (or even
> ...

Rather than just imagining, sit down with your PM and discuss a cost analysis 
and see where the money is going.  Contrast cost analyses of UML-documented 
projects vs. documentation done in other tools and you'll see what I mean.


> You need to have some idea of what OOP is then you
> will realize how useful UML is.  To get a quick start
> at UML see "UML distilled" by Fowler and Scott and for
> full blown UML exposure see "The Unified Modeling
> Language User Guide"  by Booch, Rumbaugh, Jacobson.
> These "three amigos" are the inventors of UML.

Don't disagree that they are useful, but again, proper use of it is overkill 
in a lot of software projects.  Regarding proper use, Jacobsen was hired on 
one of our projects to help best implement the process for that project (in 
the Objectory days).  Months later, we had to make significant changes as the 
documentation level was considerable overkill, and would've lead to complete 
failure if it were continued in that manner.

Cheers,
-Neil.





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