For a long time I’ve been battling with the concept of round-trip engineering. It’s always seemed like overkill, because if you have sufficient design information to automate the code generation, you end up with a very cluttered model. In addition, none of the tools I’ve used have ever been able to capture sufficient detail; for example, sequence diagrams don’t even seem capable of dealing with simple constructs such as variable assignment. I know diagrams are nice, but aren’t you ultimately just swapping a text-based language for a diagram-based language. What’s the point of adding this extra layer to your process precisely?
Well, I think the final nail was put in the coffin for me when I read that the source code is the design. At least I know which side of the fence I sit on now.
By the way, this is the 100th post on Sleep Interrupted!
Tags: programming