[Uml-devel] usability problems

[Stefan Klett]

Greets to the umbrello developers,

A few day ago looked around in order to find a tool which allows me to
plan my current projects using the UML. My working platform is Linux
(SuSE 8.0) and so I found umbrello, installed it, and found that it is the
modeler which is on the right track to become the most powerful UML tool
on this target-platform.  I essentially liked the way things were
_intended_ to work which shows in the case that every thing goes fine
-however in RL things are not this way, and so I like to make some
comments which are intended to help to make umbrello more usable than it is now (I used
the  umbrello-1.1rc1.tar.bz2 tarball) .

While trying to draw some sequence diagrams I painfully missed a "undo"
option - which allows to undo at least the last step done in exactly the
manner and extend it was performed.

In many cases the "delete selected" option does not work(at all) - or
sometimes is too coarse grained -ex: it deleted the whole object instead
of the surplus message arrow like it was intended. (I refer to the parts
of a diagram augmented with the blue marks in the corner as "selected" please correct
me if I got the concept wrong) - farther an "paste" did in some cases not
insert exactly the parts deleted most recently - but only portions of
them. Some of the associations (message arrows) gone with the "delete"
were lost to nirvana -and did never show up again. (As I thought of the cut-paste thing as a
workaround for undo redo - the result was somewhat dicourraging)

The second problem is founded in the way umbrello makes the descision
whether a message is intended to be sent to the object itself or to
another object. AFAIK there is no way to make this  decision
intensionally, but is left to the modeler (I guess the intention was to make this by a
kind of "mouse-gesture"- the way an object is touched by the mouse while
dragging ) - but unfortunately this in most of the cases did not work- the
results were that i only was able to send self references, but found no
way to express that i wanted to send a message to a different object in
the diagram(of course resulting in many surplus "loops" which could not be
deleted due to the problem described above). Therefore i am begging you to
to include a possibility to influence  this behaviour - the "right mouse
down" menue would be a good place to say: loop or straight).

Please mail me if something in the points above apear to be unclear.

I hope my "beta testing report" will help the further devleopment of
umbrello - keep going :-)

Thank you for your time
Stefan