UML: A thousand words no less.

Over the years I have been trying to incorporate more formal method and notation into what I do. I am a lazy, procrastinating son of a bitch, so this has not always been a success. My goal is to produce my own repeatable "method" for software development, incorporating my favourite bits from books and techniques I have met along the way.

I am quite keen on some of the diagrams in UML, some of them are of little use in a Notes environment but I often use Use Case and State Diagrams. On Monday I will be involved in the workshops for a new workflow system. To get the requirements down and tease out any inconsistencies I plan to guide the users through constructing a State Diagram so we can, in real time, capture the workflow, roles and reader/authors.

Up till now I have had to rely on scribbling this stuff down or using Visio but today I discovered Gentleware's Poseidon software. It is Java based, so loads a bit slowly, but after that it's great. No honest, it really is rather good. Whip up a class diagram and generate the Java classes, groovy. What's more the community edition is free. Have a look.