So, also if I’m still feverish so on low profile on Gentoo, I got today some infos about a job that awaits me, that is going to be fine actually, as I really needed one right now 🙂
But if I can work on a single mental idea when I’m working on a relatively pointless project for myself, when I have to work for someone else I try to provide as much documentation of what I do and decide, for two main reasons: it’s more professional and they can’t tell me I never documented some design choice that they don’t like 😛
For this reason I always liked using UML when designing how stuff should work… the class diagram is useful when modelling data-centric stuff, the activity diagram is useful when modelling function-centric stuff. My current work is in the second category.
So an activity diagram is basically an old flow chart under steroids, no? It should be easy to draw one without even using specific UML tools, but I also think that CASE tools are created for a reason and should be used whenever possible, so that they can also be extended and completed… call me a visionary, I like to do the less work possible about what my job is, also if that ends up adding more work on something else.
So I excluded DIA, KChart and OpenOffice Draw for the diagram creation because they are not CASE tools properly told.. I decided to go with Umbrello, that should be a full-featured UML tool for KDE… Unfortunately, it’s not that full featured it seems. The default 3.5.1 version has a big problem that made me unable to complete the diagram as I wanted: the “fork” widget wasn’t allowing more than one outgoing association with an activity… wait but that’s what forks are for, isn’t it?
I found the problem in the source and I’ve fixed it right now, but it took me a while to understand the problem. Add to that the fact that Umbrello used to crash pretty often, and that its XMI files are incompatible with poseidonCE’s ones (intersting tool, too bad it’s closed source, proprietary, and not exactly cheap when you need to use it for work), and you know why I usually ended up working on my graphs with paper, pencil and a ruler…
Anyway, I’ll see to hack at Umbrello a bit more now and tomorrow so maybe I can have it working for what I need and I can apply the fixes upstream.