Re: A call to action / Guidelines

[Jorge Ferrer Zarzuela <jferrer ieeesb etsit upm es>]

Hi again,

> > > Have you heard of UML? I would think that that would benefit us greatly
> > > in documenting our efforts. UML is VERY process driven and it would help
> > > if we all used it.  
> > >
> > > This is where I excel, documenting the process and I've already begun
> > > this with the LDP folks.  Both documents should be aligned so that it's
> > > easy to move from one to the other and traceability is VERY important
> > > from a QA perspective. I'll at least start something in the next few
> > > days, like an outline.
> > 
> > I'm not familiar with any of these TLAs; could you explain?  8)
> > 
> 
> UML is Unified Modeling Language by Rationale Rose CTOs (I think) and
> the authors Booch, Jacobson, and Rumbaugh.  UML is the "successor to the
> wave of object-orientated analysis and design (OOA&D) methods that
> appeared in the late '80s and early '90s."  That's from page 1 of the
> book, "UML Distilled, 2nd Edition, A Brief Guid to the Standard Object
> Modeling Language."  Most big organzations use UML to help chart their
> actions for planning and execution of the plan. I find DIA (check out
> freshmeat.net) to be a great free progrmm to use which can document UML
> stuff.
> 

I've been used UML lately in one of my projects.  It was a small project
so I wasn't sure that it would be helpful but the conclusion is: YES IT IS
HELPFUL. More than that, IMHO in a free software project it would be
specially helpful because:

  - Being an object oriented method (like GNOME and GTK are) it is great
for designing software that is easily mantainable. That is important in
free software project where the software can go from some group of
developers to another.

  - The UML diagrams provide great documentation which is easily
understood because it is graphical and because the UML syntax is an
standard.

  - It helps produce better quality software. 

  - It helps developers of different modules of the same application to
communicate through the UML diagrams. Very useful when there are several
developers, probably from different parts of the world (son they won't see
each other in person).

  - There might be more that I'm missing ;-)

But we have to be careful here. UML by itself is really just a syntax to
make diagrams. The advantages I mentioned only make sense when you combine
it with some methodology. The guy's at rational have their own:

  RUP: Rational Unified Process
  http://www.rational.com/products/rup/index.jsp

I have read some of it and I believe it has very nice ideas. But it is far
more general that what most of GNOME projects would need (in fact most
companys that use RUP adapt it to their particular needs). I'm not an
expert of this but IMHO what would be great for GNOME would be using a
variation of RUP adapted to the GNOME project's needs and maybe taking
some ideas from the SEI's CMM. This process would include as an important
part the making of a good user interface.

You, Kevin seem to know A LOT about this. What do you think?
I could help if we start something like this but I believe that I do not
have the experience to start it.

>>>DIA for Linux has a UML function.  We should look at it.

I've used DIA and it's a great tool. But IMHO to work with UML it's not
perfect because it just helps creating the diagrams but does't help in
ensuring that there is consistency among them.

A much more complete free software tool is 'ArgoUML' which can be found at
http://argouml.tigris.org/

It runs with Java 1.2. A problem with it is it's  and it's cpu and memory
requirement, but nothing is perfect.


I hope to have been helpful :-)


See you,
	Jorge