Has anyone used UML?

[Geoffrey Gerrietts]

I'm told by one recent pop-psychology trend that people have different
learning styles -- some do better learning by sight, others do better
learning by sound, still others learn better when in motion.

I find that doing all three -- drawing little UML widgets on the whiteboard
while talking to a colleague -- really unlocks a lot of problems for me, and
lets me think through consequences more clearly.

I also find that slapping UML widgets together in Visio helps me think about
subsystem composition and specific processing tasks. It's a convenient way
for me to think from subsystem requirements to specific interfaces and
objects.

It's pretty rare that the UML I generate makes its way into someone else's
hands, let alone into a formal repository somewhere. But it is useful to me;
it takes some of the burden of visualization off my short-term memory and
puts it onto Visio's shoulders.

I used Dia for a while, but grew frustrated with their support for some of
the UML I was trying to use (Use case diagrams, at the time); that was
several months ago and I heartily recommend investigating Dia, too. I plan
to, whenever I get some breathing room between my projects.

The O'Reilly Nutshell book has some successes and some failures. It tries to
explain both UML and its role in the RUP (Rational Unified Process) without
directly talking about RUP. That makes for much deep-wading before you
actually get to the part of the book you care about, which is what the
little diagramming widgets mean.

I've had peers borrow the UML in a Nutshell book because it's got more
details, but almost universally, they prefered to cut their teeth on UML
Distilled. I read a bunch of the O'Reilly book, and learned some. The
majority of the book didn't make sense until I had a couple courses in
Rational's engineering process, though. The majority of my UML knowledge
came from using Visio and learning by doing. How sad is that? :)

Thanks,
--G.

---
Geoff Gerrietts <geoff at homegain.com>
Software Engineer, HomeGain.com
510-655-0800 x4320