Re: proper use of .java files (layout)
On 27.12.2012 17:46, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
The flow charts were longer than the assembly language code, no more
readable, and contained a proper subset of the information in the code,
including its comments, so they were really useless. They gave no
architectural or design insight. They existed only in order to be able
to say we had a flow chart.
Neat! ;-)
Round trip UML smells of that situation.
Yes. I believe the reason for that is that diagram != diagram: a
diagram generated from some input can only apply standard layout rules.
But a diagram created by a human will have deliberate layout and a
human will also likely refrain from putting all classes of a single
package (or even a complete source tree) in a single diagram.
And in order to update a diagram from source code you always need
additional data - either the old diagram or some form of meta data which
describes placement. For things created in code you would still get
default placement and a human would have to edit the diagram anyway.
And if the roundtrip tool would also to need to handle renaming of
entities like classes and interfaces (a common operation during
refactoring) there would also need to be support from the IDE to record
these types of changes and update diagrams properly.
Then we still haven't covered how a project with a few thousand classes
is handled efficiently (not in terms of CPU cycles but in terms of
diagrams which provide benefit to the reader).
Plenty of years ago I got to evaluate the first version of a roundtrip
UML tool which supported sequence diagrams (as representations of
methods). I create a sequence diagram with two method invocations both
of which returned String. The code didn't compile. It turned out that
both variables had the same name. I couldn't believe they did not think
of that situation when I stumbled across this after five minutes. Well,
my company didn't by the tool then. :-)
Kind regards
robert
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