Chapter 23: Ten Useful UML Modeling Tools

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Overview

In This Chapter

• Knowing which tool to use just in CASE

• Choosing a UML modeling tool

No matter how good you are at drawing, even if you’re an artist, you’re not going to do a lot of UML by hand on paper or even on a whiteboard. Maybe for a few high-level diagrams, it’ll work. But the more complex diagrams are difficult and hard to draw, and the cross-diagram consistency quickly gets out of hand, even if you’re handy with a drawing tool. Many different UML tools are vying in the market for the privilege of helping you with drawing. Most of these tools will do more than drawing, even more than modeling—they’ll do consistency checking, generate code, write reports, reverse-engineer existing code into models, and a host of other things. The full-featured tools are often called CASE tools, where CASE, in case you didn’t know, stands for Computer-Aided Software (or sometimes System) Engineering. Some don’t like the CASE tool moniker and prefer Modeling tool because the CASE tools got a bad name in the early nineties when they weren’t quite the silver-bullet solution they were claimed to be. But whatever name you call them, reach for these tools when you want to do UML modeling.

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