(responding to Mark Kamosk)
<snip> > My guess is that the Activity diagram is abstracted too far from > implementation to do this meaningfully. The states are not discretely > represented, in most cases. Even given to a pure OO language, there are few > handles by which this could be done. That's my guess. (So too with Sequence > Diagrams, I expect.) Furthermore, I know that the impetus behind UML > suggests the abstract ought NOT be directly tied to implementation-specific > details. This I agree with, in theory... but... I still MUST build the > system in the real world with code. The model will not get me anywhere, so > the 2 ARE related, at some level, necessarily. That's the quandary. I don't > want to break the rules of UML and yet still I yearn for the impossible-- to > tie my abstract workflow Activity Diagram to my code base. Even a manual > one-way push would be great to get snapshots of what is going on. <snip> There is a theme that occasionally crops up - "Why can't I extract an Analysis Diagram (/ sequence diagram / activity diagram etc.) by reverse engineering my code?" The simple answer is that these all select a particular viewpoint and abstract away unwanted detail. Unfortunately, the reverse-engineering tool cannot know what detail is unwanted. Also a problem, but more tractable, it can't know what viewpoint is wanted. Thus when the detail changes in the code, it cannot know whether the change is wanted or not - and unless it knows what code was previously marked as unwanded in the diagram, (i.e. keeps track of the previous code and its representation (if any) in the model), it cannot distinguish between changed code and code that is unchanged but 'unwanted in the model'. I believe various tool vendors are thinking about addressing these problems, but don't expect any 'magic wand' tool in the near future. Paul Oldfield any opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of Mentors of Cally ************************************************************************ * Rose Forum is a public venue for ideas and discussions. * For technical support, visit http://www.rational.com/support * * Post or Reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Subscription Requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Archive of messages: * http://www.rational.com/support/usergroups/rose/rose_forum.jsp * Other Requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To unsubscribe from the list, please send email * To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Subject: <BLANK> * Body: unsubscribe rose_forum *************************************************************************
