[Uml-devel] usability suggestions

[Pekka Jääskeläinen]

Hello,

I think Umbrello has the potential to be a good enough replacement
for Rational Rose for my needs, the needed features are (almost) there.
The biggest obstacle, in my opinion, for it to be a seriously usable
replacement are the crash problems (and other weird bugs) which show up
occasionally. I think these problems scare away many new potential
users (testers). They did scare me away a half a year ago.

Oliver Kellogg wrote:
[about refactoring current design to a MVC model]
> Umbrello is in dire need of more contributors to push ahead
> big things like this. I'm afraid with the current manpower
> it's just not doable.

If the architecture is clearly separated to a model (no UI stuff) and
view/control (Qt stuff), it would be easier to start writing automatic
unit tests against the model part, thus some bugs could be
detected automatically when they are introduced in the code base.

So, after Someone who knows both the Qt/KDE API and the current
Umbrello design makes some sort of "transition plan", I'm ready
to help implementing that plan. I wouldn't dare to start poking
around the current code base too much without any unit tests in
place nor without having some kind of design/plan on how it should
be done. Additionally, some kind of a test document would of course
be great for testing the UI before any releases.

Greets,
Pekka