Bulldozer00's Blog

Atego’s Artisan Real-Time Studio, Sparx’s Enterprise Architect, and IBM’s Rational Rhapsody are big and expensive UML  modeling tools. You would think they support all of the basic visual modeling elements of the UML, no?

On the left side of the figure below, I show the four fundamental, visual UML symbols for conjuring up (wrong, incomplete, and inconsistent) structural views of an object-oriented software system in the form of class diagrams, deployment diagrams, component diagrams, etc.

It blows BD00’s already incoherently twisted mind that Artisan Studio doesn’t provide visual elements for a UML Node or a Component. As can be seen on the right side of the figure, the work-around is to use stereotyped Classifier elements to fill the void. It’s annoying and disappointing, dontcha think?

But hey, not many people (especially extreme left-wing agile zealots) buy into the potential of the UML for shortening the development time and long-term cost of big, sprawling, long-lived software systems . So, “meh” to this irrelevant post.

Note: I’m a relatively newbie user of Artisan Studio. If you’re an advanced user and you know that I’m mistaken here, then please speak up and tell me how to find these two seemingly-hidden buggers.