Bulldozer00's Blog

Since I’ve noticed that my ICONIX SysML training preview post has received quite a few hits over the past several months and I haven’t written a followup post, I decided that now is the time to do it.

The Bad

When the course was over, I felt very disappointed. Instead of focusing on SysML – which is embedded in the title of the course, SysML was given second class treatment and the main thrusts were centered on:

• Teaching the usage of the big and sprawling Enterprise Architect software modeling and code generation tool
• Teaching a “bent”,  non-standard, subset of  UML that supports ICONIX’s homegrown software design process: “Use Case Driven Object Modeling“

Only the last (not first) one third of the class handout covered the SysML diagrams and symbolology while the first two thirds covered UML, albeit in a subserviant role to the ICONIX process.

The Good

Although the examples in the handout material were all geared toward database-centric business transaction systems, but my company is in the business of building real-time sensor systems, the teachers facilitated the real time development of a set of use cases, robustness diagrams, and class diagrams for the sensor project we were kicking off. It was a worthwhile team building experience and it surfaced a boatload of ambiguities and misunderstandings between team members. The teachers were skilled facilitators and they did a great job keeping things moving briskly while remaining in the background and not dominating the working sessions.

The Summary