Hi,
This list seems to be not very active, but still I hope on some reaction.
May be this mail is offtopic, but I'm quite a newbee in CASE et all. actually, I've no regular education as IT professional.
I've being hackin for 10+years, and figured out for me that the most time I don't envent anything, the most time I had just to take one pice of existing source code and built in in to another programm, or rewrite it for using with another library, on another language for another OS. It makes me kind of sick.
There are grate ( and less grate ) packages to do OOA, OOD, OOP but most of them are just braindead charting tools with code-generating features.
The problems they have is that no way to use all that code that one allready have.
90% all existing programms, especially common business application, are more than 10 years old and have nothing to do with OO, (COBOL never die ) look at ol this ERPs..
There is a lot of programms written to use not OO ( or semi -OO ) GUI libraries ( all that Motiff, gtk++ etc. stuff ), they are greate, but to port it to newer GUI is often simple but dumb work.
I don't belive that just another charting tool with even better intergration one specific platform cann chage the situation.
I think, that the Real Good Thing is a suite of following 5 basic tools
1. Reverse-engenering tool ( Fuzzy, also that can copy with not OO styled, even buggy code )
2. Model simplifier ( The real program are rare designed from scratch, almoust usual is 5 year old code with some messy hacks did by not-expirienced programmer) It must expand the code to some standard (three-tire etc.)
3. Some graphical manupulation tool to alter model, with possibility _dynamicly_ analyse the processes. ( A kind of interpreter of UML ) It's quite nessesary to understand how it works, anlalyse concurrency and performance issues..
4. Solution database ( Tool to extract and recognise algorythmen ) i.e. if I have buble sort integrated somethere in code, I expect that system recognize it as sorting algorythm, and that I easely can replace it with other more.
5. Code generator ( even optimising / reducing ) if I have software to 100% generated from model, it is a Good Idea to make Hi-Level Optimisation, throw away not used methods, even generate some pure C, PASCAL or even Assembler code ( UML+-> ASM compiler ;-)
This is not to do software develpment but re-development. Recently I've lloked through job-adds, and I've seen that although there is a lot of demand for programmer, the jobs are mostly not exciting. Customising and re-develop...
Maybe it's crasy, but I dream about it.
I'm looking for someone to discuss, or someone who can tell me "forget it, company XYsoft sells it allready for gazillion $".