[Uml-devel] usability suggestions

[Pekka Jääskeläinen]

Hi all,

Maybe I should introduce myself at this point. I work as a research
assistant at Tampere University of Technology, Finland. I sought for
free replacement for Rational Rose (I hate booting to Windows just
because of it) around last christmas to use in my work (and
master's thesis). At that time I found that Umbrello was not even
closely usable because of bugginess (crashes and weird behavior).
Now I think it's already quite usable, but still needs some
stabilization.

I'm willing to help, at least occasionally.

Sebastian Stein wrote:
> There is no politic in this project, that's why I like it. But maybe it is
> Umbrello's problem, that the project is so un-political, because politics
> seem to attract many developers ;-)

It's not about attraction. I believe complex programs *cannot* be built,
or at least maintained sensibly in the long run, without some kind of 
centralized control. No need to be facist with the "policy", but on the
other hand the development process of the ants that build the anthill 
might not be exactly suitable either. I'm talking about naming people
who take responsiblity of maintaining some parts. Actually, I'm not
a big fan of nature programs in the television, so in reality it
might be that the building of the anthill is actually a very controlled
process :)

For example, the Linux development process might seem chaotic to
someone, but actually it's very controlled. Linus controls the patches
that go into his branch. For bigger subsystems like VM stuff
he seems to have people he trusts controlling the development in
those parts. Also, individual drivers can be seen as smaller
subsystems that sometimes have the maintainers of their own.

The centralized control is even more important when doing programming in
object oriented manner because the design and planning ahead is even
more important to get the profit from object orientation in the first
place.

This is all only my opinion, and don't get me wrong, I didn't mean
that Umbrello's development process is "ants building the anthill",
it's really not. There are clearly people controlling the development.

Umbrello is already usable for me, and I'm really grateful for that.
What I'm trying to say that if there's some "subsystem" I can start
working on, I'm listening. I just need some "pointers" to get started
with it.

Sorry to be off-topic, have a nice evening,
Pekka