All UML tools SUCK!
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006The other day I needed to go through some design of my current project with another team, so I naively thought: This UML thing was all the rage 10 years ago and even if it didn’t work at all back then they must surely have gotten their act together since then. So I should be able to just download some tool and with a quick flick of the wrist spit out beautiful UML diagrams by the dozen from my exquisitely crafted and factored domain model.
Not quite…
Many hours later and around 10 dysfunctional tools discarded I realize the terrible truth: all UML tools suck! Either the installer crashes (!), the GUI just won’t launch, the IntelliJ plugin just doesn’t work or the reverse-engineering crashes producing nothing at all.
I mean, come on, how hard can it be! Wasn’t the whole point of UML and up-front design and all that jazz supposed to create higher quality software? In these days of actually pretty good software (even Windows is kinda functional) the only category of software that consistently suck are the very tools that supposedly should be used to design high quality software.
The irony.
