TopCoder UML 1.2.5 has just been released .

TopCoder UML is “an easy to use, consistent modeling tool for use in Design and Development competitions” hosted at TopCoder , the world’s largest community OF competitive software developers. AND competition IS the KEY word here, the TopCoder community follows a UNIQUE competition-based development process TO produce software FOR EXTERNAL companies. Each phasse OF the development process (FROM conceptualization TO implementation) IS organized AS a competition among TopCoder members. The money paid by the company IS used TO “reward” the winners. Interesting development model. I’d love to get some feedback from people (either TopCoder members or companies) that have actually used it.

In 2006, they decided to eat their own dog food and follow this development method to create a UML tool adapted to their specific competition needs. The result is not bad. The UML tool allows you to specify class, use case, sequence and activity diagrams and do some Java and C# code-generation.

Even if I’m NOT going TO ADD this tool TO my list OF frequently-used list OF UML tools AND I’m not sure what motivated them to create their own tool instead of reusing an existing one (I don´t see any special feature in this tool) I still think this is an interesting experience. Btw, you can download the source code of the tool if you are interested.

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