Your tool for doing UML designs?

Hi guys !

I’m looking for a tool to create functional requirements with UML langage (or other?). There are tons of tools and I don’t know how to choose. Could you please give a word about your favourites, with pros and cons?

The requirements I need to draft are mostly for little pieces inside a big application, not for whole application itself. I’m particulary interested in defining customers needs and code architecture.

Thanks a lot !

Ben

Can try Sparx Enterprise Architect. It is the way for ERP systems and so professional.
http://www.sparxsystems.com/products/ea/requirements.html

When I need to do UML, I jump into my time machine and travel back to 1997… fire up Rational Rose on the big 21" CRT and go to town (restarting it every 20 minutes after it crashes). Ah… the good ol’ days.

:smile:

Sparx looks nice, though I’ve never tried it. Almost universally, every tool I’ve tried sucks in one way or another. I eventually came to the conclusion that it’s UML itself that kind of sucks for conveying any real detail but your mileage may vary.

We were starting to make stub classes and using the tools’ reverse engineering functionality to create the diagrams because it was 100x easier. That’s when I started to get suspicious. When other engineers trying to interpret the diagrams asked to see our stub code then we just stopped making the diagrams.

Not really trying to be snarky… consider if the diagrams will provide any real value over some class stubs or interfaces. UML implies you are already writing these things anyway… you are just having to point and click a lot. I’ve personally never found the lines linking things very useful after that.

I can’t agree more. In my case, though, I need to establish communication between ingeneers and non-ingeneers populations. The long and boring textual documents are much more hard to read/write/understand than schemes, and I have to naive hope that UML could help.

Thanks for pointing my to sparx, I’ll give it a try !

I’ve used sparx (a few years ago). It was the least sucky of all UML tools I have used. In my case it was mostly designing XML-schemas or using it to draw conceptual-system-designs so can’t speak to much about java-class-diagrams.

I usually use modelio or LucidChart, it depends on the scope and the people that will actually read it

I use UML to investigate stuff. For example, making a sequence diagram helped make clear to me how a network jme example worked and what the basic needed functionalities were.

The uml tool that worked best for me was a visio extension (years ago).

i don’t usually do UML but when i do … I use violetUML it’s super light .

I can recommend UMLet, its a neat, simple-to-use open source program for UML.