Now is the time -- ADTmag

Now is the time

By Deborah Melewski
June 18, 2001

According to the OMG's Soley, acceptance of UML has been excellent. There are still organizations that are not doing modeling, he said, but that will not last. "It may be a lot easier to sit down and start writing, but the code suffers. Now is the time to take a look at object-oriented analysis and design," said Soley. "There's no longer the excuse of there being too much to look at; everyone should be using it."

There is reportable UML success. "UML gives us a visual tool to see the architecture, as opposed to just reading it or looking through code," said Case Parts' Bullock. "I've found nothing lacking; maybe if we had more realtime applications we might run into that. But for what we employ, it has been very complete."

UML is also an extensible language, said Rational's Booch. "We recognized that there will be future development that we can't anticipate, and we will continue to see evolution due to breakthrough technology."

Software tools providers are also doing their part to help organizations implement UML. Advanced Software Technologies, for example, supports the full UML notation and diagrams with its GDPro product. The company also offers UML Jumpstart, a package that provides hands-on UML training, a sample system, the GDPro visual design tool, a step-by-step introduction to implementing UML using GDPro, and a copy of UML Distilled.