LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 

Tools That Work Against You


By Allen Holub
Email    print   
February 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
The tools you use control the way you work, but some tools work against you. A bad tool encourages you to work counterproductively. Unfortunately, every OO-Design/UML-case tool that I’ve ever used falls into the you’re-better-off-without-it category.

This thought was triggered by the newly released MagicDraw 9.0 from No Magic. MagicDraw actually compares favorably to most of the competition. Nonetheless, none of these tools—including MagicDraw—help with the OO process enough to justify their cost. My comments apply to all the OO CASE tools I’ve looked at, not just MagicDraw.

Let’s start with the features. Many CASE-tool features are so poorly conceived that you wonder whether anyone at the company actually does OO Design. Consider the “design-pattern library,” which lets you paste the static structure of one of the examples in the Gang-of-Four (GoF) book into your diagram.

Patterns don’t work that way, however. The static structure of a given pattern varies considerably from program to program. The example in the GoF is just one possibility. Moreover, a single class can simultaneously participate in half a dozen (or more) patterns; you can’t “paste” a pattern structure in isolation because some of that structure may already exist.

“Round-trip engineering” is another flawed mechanism. It’s useful to import an existing piece of legacy code into a CASE tool so that you can see its structure. The resulting picture is not a design, though. In round-trip engineering, the tool generates some small percentage of the code for you. You then hack up this generated code, and at some future date, reimport it into the tool, which reconstructs some (though not all) of the diagrams that constitute the design. What you’ve really done is thrown away your design and replaced it with a picture of hacked-up code.

The reverse-engineering process also fails miserably with the dynamic model. UML “interaction diagrams” show you how a set of objects interact at runtime when modeling some scenario of some use case. The messages on a diagram are limited to those messages that are relevant to that scenario. MagicDraw imports the entire method into the diagram, so the use cases are all jumbled together into a single diagram. The resulting picture is nothing but a UML version of a flow chart.




Pages 1 2 3 


Share this link: http://sdt.bz/28426
 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter


Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
Loading




close
NEXT ARTICLE
Finding the right tool for the agile job
Experts emphasize that tools should bolster the agile process above all else Read More...
 
 
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 

Download Current Issue
FEBRUARY 2012 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?


 
blogs tab
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
02/09/2012 02:16 PM EST

Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
02/07/2012 11:57 AM EST

RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
02/04/2012 01:57 PM EST

GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
02/03/2012 12:17 PM EST

Facebook claims hacker cred
Facebook's SEC S-1 filing form includes a short essay on the Hacker Way by Mark Zuckerberg himself.
02/02/2012 08:26 AM EST

Ryan Dahl steps down
Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, steps back from his position as gatekeeper for the project.
02/01/2012 04:58 PM EST

 
Events calendar tab
Cloud Connect
2/13/2012 to 2/16/2012
Santa Clara
TechWeb

SPTechCon: The SharePoint Technology Conf.
2/26/2012 to 2/29/2012
San Francisco
BZ Media

RSA Conf.
2/27/2012 to 3/2/2012
San Francisco
RSA

IBM Pulse Conf.
3/4/2012 to 3/7/2012
Las Vegas
IBM Tivoli

Game Developer Conf.
3/5/2012 to 3/9/2012
San Francisco
TechWeb