[Uml-devel] Wish for redesign

[Sebastian Stein]

Andrew Sutton <ansutton at kent.edu> [021025 07:07]:
> it seems to me that most of the people using uml (or even considering to use 
> uml) are software engineers or architects or what have you, and most work of 
> this variety (sorry to say) revolves around M$ world. given that most people 
> doing serious design work are writing for windows, why build a product for it 
> on linux?

That's very true I think. But we also have to look a the other side. I can
talk about the case tool Case 4.0. It's a tool for structured analysis and
design and not OOP. Nevertheless. They have it integrated very well into the
Windows desktop environment. You can add MS Word documents to every diagram
and it can generate code for MFC and ODBC. Very well! But, you can't really
use the tool to design a non Windows based system. The tool is too
integrated. The generated code is in that way that the VC++ 6 compiler could
compile it very well, but it is not a good code for other compiler, not even
Borland.

What I like to say is that I think it is not that good to integrate such an
app too much. It should be possible to even run it on Unix without having
KDE. Ok, a Qt libary is ok, but I don't like GTK apps which require all
gnome libaries as well.
 
> 1. Who are our primary customers (target audience for this application)?

Maybe we are building the tool for:

- a small group of professionals who want to use such a tool in their
  sparetime
- students
- a maybe increasing number of commercial developers, who are going to
  support the Unix environment

But I think that the "hacker" would never use such a tool. And most
commercial developers are from big companies and such companies have their
own tools and processes to develop software. Maybe we could adress people in
small companies who want to do UML, but the financal risk to invest in a
expensive tool is to high.

> 2. What services can we build into the application to make it more available 
> to open source developers (i.e. hackers)

Good questions, I think this would need some kind of research ;-)
 
> 3. How can we get open source developers to use it?
 
I think only by showing how fast development can get with such a tool. We
can also support them in reducing the time needed to generate code
documentation and so on.

> 4. How can we reduce the learning curve of UML?

Writing small tutorials and add them to our webpage. I would like to do
this, but before I do this I need a) more time and b) more knowledge about
UML ;-)
 
> 5. How can we reduce the "process association" affiliated with designing 
> software as opposed to writing software. that is, can we fool hackers into 
> adopting even the most trivial of processes for writing open source software?

I don't think so. But on the other hand I'm thinking of people like the guys
of KMyMoney (with the nice development handbook). I think they would be a
group of interest.
 
> 6. How can we make the application more available (easier to use) for
> hackers?  Would this affect its full range of capabilities for
> professional software engineers?

I think the app must support a lot of things developers don't like to do
like writing documentation.
 
Steinchen
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