I’ve had this kicking around in my bookmarks for ages, but I thought I’d share…<\/P>
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Have you ever had to diagram in UML using Visio? It’s a painful process. The UML add-in for Visio has a number of deficiencies:<\/P>
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* Try the following: Create a sequence diagram. Add some objects and method calls between those objects. Realize that you forgot a step. Marquee and move all the method calls down a notch so that you can insert the forgotten method. Guess what? Visio just forgot all the method names previously entered. You have to manually wire-up the method names again. When actually designing a software system, you are constantly re-ordering methods, removing methods, inserting methods, etc. The team that maintains the Visio UML Add-in should really use their own tool for designing version N+1.<\/P>
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You can’t fault Visio completely. It’s a diagraming tool, not a software engineering tool. So how do you stop Visio from pretending to be a software engineering tool and force it to do what it’s good at (being a diagraming tool)? You grab Pavel Hruby<\/A>‘s UML 2.0 Stencil for Visio<\/A>. Thank you, Pavel! You’ve made my time with Visio that much more tolerable.<\/P> P.S. Some of you might ask, “Why don’t you use a real UML tool like [insert favourite UML tool here]?” I’m a consultant. As a consultant, it’s often hard to convince a client to buy tools and Visio comes free with many versions of Visual Studio. Typically I’ll need to give my client soft copies of any design artifacts in a file format that they can read. Typically that also means Visio. So like it or hate it, Visio is often the lowest common denominator that all developers on a team can use or have access to.<\/P> P.P.S. Some of you might be wondering, given my choice, what my favourite UML tool is? Rational Rose, Borland Together, Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect, … I’ve tried a lot of different UML tools over the years and while Borland Together is my favourite UML software package, the best UML designer I’ve ever worked with is definitely a large whiteboard and a digital camera. Honestly, if you can’t design good UML on a whiteboard, the software packages aren’t going to help you much.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve had this kicking around in my bookmarks for ages, but I thought I’d share… Have you ever had to diagram in UML using Visio? It’s a painful process. The UML add-in for Visio has a number of deficiencies: Doesn’t support the latest spec (UML 2.0) Even with the spec it supports, it gets some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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