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Designing Software Product Lines with UML: From Use Cases to Pattern-Based Software Architectures Review by Damon Carr
An interesting contribution but does not solve the Problems
All,
There are many sources that if you are reading this you are probably aware of. UML is in my opinion a robust enough modeling environment to do pattern based software architectures at a macro level but this post is about taking UML a step farther to Domain Specific Software Factory type concepts, which this book dances around and I believe crosses over into territority that is quite dangerous for UML (and I am a huge fan of UML. I use it for Agile Modeling as well as early stage iteration design, but the UML is superceeded by Test Driven Development at development time).
As long as you stay at a rather low level of abstraction, UML is fine. However it semantically falls apart as the level of abstraction rises and you try to build very specific domain solutions (and abstraction we know will rise in the bext few months/years dramatically with the MDA initiative and Microsoft's Software Factories).
If you want to understand why UML runs out of gas as you move up in abstraction and get more specific in your domain, rather then rehash other's arguments, read the book "Software Factories" - Appendix B, by Steve Cook and Stuart Kent. It explains in detail why UML is a dead end for large scale, mass market software factories and model driven development. Alternatively, in my opinion, as long as you keep things technical and close to the 'classes, patterns, general purpose frameworks like logging, ORM, etc.' you are fine I believe.
The last paragraph says it all:
"In its role as the standard notation for documenting and communicating Object-Oriented concepts, UML 2 represents a useful incremental extension to UML 1. However, it remains poor at representing specific programming languages and platform technologies"....
There is much, much more. The above is copyright Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana. 2004, ISBN: 0-471-20284-3 All Rights Reserved.
I strongly recommend you read the software factories book above to get an understanding and perhaps arrive at a different perspective then trying to 'make the UML shoe fit'.. Many seem to just do anything to go against Microsoft in a very unscientific way. Some people let emotions and false assumptions lead them astray from what is scientifically the right answer. I am asking you all now to think like a scientist and have an open mind to what is the best solution for a given problem. I'm not even saying this is wrong. Just far less correct and appropriate. Let your own investigation lead you to the answer, not marketing or what I have to say.