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UML, Everywhere

flowchart, n.: The innumerate misleading the illiterate.

— Stan Kelly-Bootle, “The Devil’s DP Dictionary”

A mechanical engineer who sees the symbol ⊥ in a diagram will immediately realize that a feature is specified to be perpendicular to another. In contrast, a software engineer looking at a diagram’s line ending with the symbol ◊ will, at best, wonder whether it denotes aggregation (as in UML), or a “zero or one” cardinality (as in IDEF1X), or something else invented by a creative academic. Worse, many developers will simply scratch their head in bewilderment.

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Visualizing Revision Logs with a UML Sequence Diagram

How can you visualize the developers' contributions in a collaborative project? One way involves drawing timelines adorned with marks indicating each developer's contribution. This is a simple UML sequence diagram, a diagram that allows you to see the interactions of objects, but in this case the objects are the actual developers and the interactions are their contributions.

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UMLGraph Version 5.1

Over the summer two articles presented UMLGraph to the masses. Paul Duvall wrote on IBM developerWorks an article titled Automation for the people: Pushbutton documentation, and Meera Subbarao published on DZone Javalobby another piece on how to reverse-engineer source code into UML diagrams. In addition, I received a number of interesting patches and contributions. As a result I decided it was time to release UMLGraph version 5.1.

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An Update on UMLGraph

Today I released version 5.0 of UMLGraph. This release contains a couple of important changes: six new shapes (components, nodes, collaborations, use cases, notes, and active classes), a facility for adding notes, and the hosting and packaging under its own domain name umlgraph.org.

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UML Class Diagrams from C++ Code

I needed a UML class diagram of the classes I use in the implementation of CScout refactoring browser. I drew the last such diagram on paper about four years ago, so it was definitely out of date. I always say that whenever possible documentation should be automatically generated from the code, so I decided to automate the task.

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UMLGraph Update

I have updated the UMLGraph program to run under Java 1.5.

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