The agile enterprise collaboration platform Mindtouch offers a script in its community portal to draw UML sequence diagrams in a “napkin style”, i.e. giving the impression that the diagram has been quickly drawn in a piece of paper/napkin.
This is not the only tool to offer this kind of informal appearance (see, for instance, the popular scruffy notation offered by yUML ). I’m NOT sure why people LIKE this informal appearance but TO me it seems that even the few times that we do model we ARE so ashamed that we need TO disguise our modeling efforts under this kind OF informal look TO feel good 🙂 . Sometimes I have the feeling that modeling IS NOT “cool”: REAL programmers do NOT need models! modeling IS FOR pussies! (ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit here … or maybe not)
By the way, the script is based on the textual UML drawing web service Web Sequence Diagrams , one of many available tools for the textual specification of UML diagrams.
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. Â More about me.
Hi Jordi,
happy new year! I don’t know if people LIKE this informal style FOR presenting UML sequence diagrams mainly because they feel they need TO disguise ANY modeling effort WITH pretty pictures… IN part, I suspect that this TYPE OF drawing gives TO modeling a hand-crafted feeling. After ALL, software production IS IN part also a question OF style (art?). Ok, it IS NOT a technical consideration, but I think something LIKE that happens IN the mind OF many modelers (AND surely it happens TO me :).
Ciao,
Andrea
I think that a great part of the developers out there don’t have high engineering skills, AND normally formality IS NOT welcome TO them. So, making an informal-look IS MORE attractive TO them. Also, IN this way, they got the feeling that models ARE less important.