EmPowerTec UML and modeling blog

Hello!

The software development magazine SD Times has published an interview about the ‘Future of UML’ with some well known experts. I’d like to summarize and comment the interview for your convenience.

The participants where

• Richard Soley (OMG Chairman and CEO)
• Bran Selic (IBM, has made significant contributions to the UML metamodel)
• Jack Greenfield (Microsoft – tool vendor)
• Cris Kobryn (PivotPoint – tool user)
• Jan Popkin (Telelogic – UML tool vendor)

Question 1: “What is the future of UML?”

Bran Selic says that the UML will be continuously maintained (interestingly, he did not say “developed”. Does this mean the speed of extension of the UML will be slower in the future? I think that would be beneficial for the acceptance of the UML). He also expects more and more people to use the UML more comprehensively e.g. for code generation and model verification. He also expects the publication of more UML profiles and thinks this a way of defining Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). I agree with this point, I also think that people underestimate UMLs extensibility and versatile applicability.

Jack Greenfield (naturally, since this is Microsoft’s official position concerning modeling methodologies) says that DSLs will be used more and more instead of UML for modeling software. UML will be used to design the DSLs themselves (I don’t think that Microsoft’s DSL tools borrow anything from UML. As usual, Microsoft tries to define their own standard).

Jan Popkin says that modeling will be important to communicate designs but the degree of coupling between the model and the code widely varies from modeling business processes (no direct relation to code) to embedded systems (highly coupled models and code).

Cris Kobryn thinks that model driven software development will become more and more important because the software industry matures. In the short term he is concerned about some shortcomings in the UML mainly “language bloat” and lack of diagram exchange in XMI 2.0. I think Cris’ opinion is the most unbiased and exact assessment of the current state of the UML.

Question 2: “How can development teams take better advantage of UML-based tools to improve the software development process?”

Jack Greenfield thinks that more usage of UML profiles will add precision to the model. Of course, he also thinks that DSLs are even better.

Cris Kobryn thinks that it is important, that the development team chooses a suitable subset of UML they want to use for the particular project. Sounds a bit like tailoring a development process and probably makes sense.

Bran Selic says that the best usage of UML depends on the degree of model driven development. Most important is that the development team realizes the value of modeling. In the past too much was promised but not enough value delivered.

Jan Popkin says that teams should try to use the UML stricter and stricter, thus becoming more comfortable with the language and the tools.

Question 3: “What role does modeling play in enhancing software security and compliance?”

Chris Kobryn says that a model driven development approach can be used to enforce certain security and compliance rules (I assume he thinks of the possibility to add security and compliance related aspects to the software using appropriate model transformations).

Jack Greenfield points out that a UML model can be used to make the softwares behavior concerning security and compliance better visible than just embedding it in code or XML configuration files (but, after all this is a primary benefit of modeling independent of security and modeling).

(Since UML as it stands is not specific to any technical aspect or domain this question seems a bit pointless to me. The answers seem to reflect this and are quite general).

Question 4: What drives development teams that haven’t previously used UML tools to adopt them?

The key drivers seem to be

• Increasing software complexity
• Less tolerance for errors
• Better IDE integration of UML tools
• Successful model driven projects by competitors

Jack Greenfield points out, that teams that have begun to use UML have often been disappointed because they found that UML is not able to effectively capture all relevant information.

Technorati Tags: modeling, model driven development, UML

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Modeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.