The Anti-Modeller
In my travels I'm often confronted by people who are genuinely confused about why we bother modelling our design work in UML; to which I always give the standard answers of improved communication through the use of diagrams instead of text, a common industry standard language, etc, etc, etc....But why are there so many people opposed to the idea of visual modelling? The question confused me for a while until I came across a number of examples of models which had been subjected to the blueprinting approach to modelling. For those not familiar with the two schools of visual modelling, blueprinting and sketching, blueprinting involves visually modelling your design in extreme detail without necessarily needing that detail. The sketching approach on the other hand says that you model complex parts of the system in order to help you think through the problem, once you have solved the problem you stop modelling.
I can understand how developers who have not used UML before and are then made to take a blueprinting approach to their designs would find the exercise tedious and probably consider a lot of it a waste of time. I believe that blueprinting has it's place particularly if you're going to off-shore your development for example; but I believe that by far for most developers the best use of UML is achieved through sketching especially now when we have tools which can reverse engineer code and produce class diagrams for use as documentation.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home