http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/tags/component/ Software architecture for hands-on software architects en Coding the Architecture Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:09:00 GMT Pebble (http://pebble.sourceforge.net) http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/2008/04/03/is_uml_on_the_way_out.html <p> One of the presenters at QCon (I think it was John Davies) asked the audience whether they used UML 2.0 and only a couple of people raised their hands. I wasn't one of them - I briefly looked at UML 2.0 a while back but I didn't feel compelled enough to use it. This got me thinking, how widespread is the use of UML nowadays? </p> <p> From my own perspective, here's where I tend to use UML within the context of a bespoke software project. </p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html#N1006A">Use case</a> diagram : A high level view of the system functionality and scope.</li> <li><a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html#N1010E">Activity</a> diagrams : A high level view of the business process that is being realised by the software. This is useful for showing parallelism.</li> <li><a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html#N10086">Class</a> and <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html#N100C1">sequence </a> diagrams : Information about architectural patterns and blueprints (e.g. describing a common implementation pattern). These are typically used by the development team.</li> <li><a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html#N10128">Component</a> and <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html#N10146">deployment </a> diagrams : Details about deployable components and how instances of those components will be/are deployed on pieces of hardware.</li> </ul> <p> As I've mentioned before, I tend to go with a <a href="http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/2008/01/18/how_much_software_design_detail_in_your_architecture_document.html">just enough</a> approach to the <a href="http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/2008/03/18/software_architecture_document_guidelines.html">software architecture document</a>, but I do definitely find that UML is useful because you don't have to think about the notation. Having said that, I do use Visio-style block diagrams for representing things like the logical and physical/infrastructure architecture (you can see a simplified version of such a diagram on <a href="http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/files/presentations/20080304-an-architecture-case-study.pdf">page 3 in this presentation</a>). I do this for two reasons. First of all, I don't think that UML provides an easy to understand notation for this sort of thing and second, these high-level architecture diagrams are typically distributed to a wider audience, some of who aren't technical and don't understand UML. </p> <p> So then, is UML on the way out? I'd be interested in your thoughts on the following. </p> <ul> <li>What notation do you use for your architecture and design diagrams?</li> <li>Is a standard diagramming notation important to you?</li> <li>How does your audience influence how you create diagrams?</li> <li>If you do use UML, <a href="http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/2007/07/20/whats_your_uml_tool_of_choice.html">what's your UML tool of choice?</a></li> </ul> http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/2008/04/03/is_uml_on_the_way_out.html#comments http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/2008/04/03/is_uml_on_the_way_out.html Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:32:00 GMT