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Subject:Re: UML 2.0 From:ct <straylightsghost -at- gmail -dot- com> To:vrfour -at- verizon -dot- net Date:Sun, 23 Mar 2008 01:14:01 -0600
Sorry to hear about the "mandate". Some similarities and echos to the
situation I'm leaving.
Hate to say it...but Enterprise Architect seems to be a tool widely
used through the industry. Not the best, not the worst...but it will
do the job. Best bet is to find a tool that you can live with, can
meet the needs requested, build a case and then make them pay for it.
If they want it, show them there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
That will either stop it or get some decent tools in the house - plus
show a willingness to do it and do it right.
UML is easy once you get a handle on it. In some cases, it's even the way to go.
-Collin
> Last Thursday our Tech Pubs group received a request to start using UML
> 2.0.
> The reason for this is that the head of the engineering department wants
> to
> generate code from these UML diagrams. This is the premise. Here's the
> background.
>
> For the past year our Tech Pubs group has documented use cases for the
> engineering department, both business and system. In each of these use
> case
> types we've included UML diagrams - activity diagrams in the business use
> cases, and component diagrams for the system use cases.
>
> The head of engineering is, well, not that bright - his grand ideas seem
> to
> come from what read in the latest computer magazine. This is the guy who
> wanted us to develop our end user documentation as a wiki, and also asked
> that we save our documents as Word 2007 docs, even though no one else in
> the
> organization used Word 2007.
>
> To make matters worse, he's told the CTO that the Tech Pubs group can
> generate source code UMLs from templates within Visio or from within
> FrameMaker 8.
>
> No, I am not kidding.
>
> I'll tell you right off the bat, I am not a UML guru. And I can also tell
> you that no one in our entire organization has a tool that can produce
> UMLs
> for source code engineering.
>
> And, after reading some of the UML forums, I can't seem to find a UML tool
> that is relatively inexpensive and also supports automated code
> generation.
> Has anyone here ever had to create UML diagrams that have been used to
> generate code? Does this sound like another wild goose chase (see wiki
> above), especially since our software product has already been developed
> and
> we're now supporting release two?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Jim
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