Re: UML 2.0

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

Hi Jim -

Enterprise Architect sounds as though it does what you're after:
http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/products/ea.html

They also have some nice UML2 resources on their site:
http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/resources/uml2_tutorial/

The place where I'm working at the moment uses this product for UML 
modeling, though not (or not yet) for generating C# source code, so I 
can't tell you how well it works in practice.

This MS page might be what got your engineering manager excited:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/HP815504511033.aspx

I like Visio for generating diagrams, and I've used the UML stencil to 
create a few simple diagrams. I know that if you skim the MS marketing 
pages and online help, it almost sounds like "... Visio UML stencil blah 
blah template rhubarb generate source code!" But gee, before I went down 
that path I'd really like to hear from someone trustworthy who says they 
are actually doing this with production-level code right now and it works.

I bet there will be a bit of support in your company for using Visio, 
because it will sound like the cheap option. I would suggest a small 
trial of Visio and any other products that end up on your shortlist. Get 
your team to recreate a few representative UML diagrams, then try to 
generate actual usable code from them. Track how much effort it takes.

Good luck. Let us know how this ends up.

Stuart

Jim Barrow <vrfour -at- verizon -dot- net> wrote:
 > 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.
 >
 > 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?

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