Practica: 10/20 hours, potentially Diplomarbeit
Goal: Improve UMLet both feature- and GUI-wise
Task: Support diagram creation from code; re-design and improve the user interface; explore new potential UMLet platforms(Web-based/mobile).
Skills: Java/Swing, design patterns, GUI design. Eclipse platform knowledge a plus. Cross-platform experience (Win/OS X/Linux) nice to have.
Start: asap
Contact: Martin Auer (E-Mail: martin.auer@tuwien.ac.at)
Description:
There is a great variety of powerful UML tools available today, the most prominent being Rational Rose.
While such tools offer sophisticated methods for handling large models, or creating code from models and models from code, they often provide an overly complex user interface for basic tasks like quickly drawing UML sketches.
The free UML tool UMLet is a lightweight Java application aimed at quickly drawing small UML diagrams. A distinct feature of UMLet is that diagram elements, even whole diagrams like sequence diagrams, can be specified quickly and in real-time via a text-based interpreter. This minimizes tedious and time-consuming mouse interactions when creating such structured diagram types.
UMLet is already used for teaching at many universities, and it was published in Wolfgang Zuser’s “Software Engineering mit UML und dem Unified Process” and Emanuele Lucchetti’s “UML Development Guide”. UMLet’s Web site recorded 1.000.000+ visits since 2004. Several publications explain UMLet’s design philosophy:
- M. Auer, J. Poelz, S. Biffl, End-User Development in a Graphical User Interface Setting, Proceedings of 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2009), Milan, May, 2009
- M. Auer, L. Meyer, S. Biffl, Explorative UML Modeling: Comparing the Usability of UML Tools, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2007), Madeira, June, 2007
- M. Auer, L. Meyer, S. Biffl, An approach for testing the usability of UML tools, Tech. Report TU:IFS:QSE 07-001, March, 2007
- M. Auer, T. Tschurtschenthaler, S. Biffl, A Flyweight UML Modeling Tool for Software Development in Heterogeneous Environments, Proceedings of EUROMICRO 2003, Antalya, September, 2003
