eyt*
Sep 27, 2004

Hang with Class Stereotypes...

As reported in Gentleware's forums, one problem that I have been experiencing with Poseidon was that when I would add stereotypes to a class, it would appear to do the right think, and as soon as I would click elsewhere, my processor would spike to 100% usage, and the tool would never come back.

I finally got around to opening a support call for this, and it seems that a simple workaround is to simply disable the Automatic Critics feature in Edit-> Settings -> Appearance. So try this if you get this problem.

Although the concept behind the automatic critic is interesting, I rarely really found this feature useful, so disabling it is a no-op. What would make this feature interesting would be to analyze your diagram and to make good suggestions about them, just like being mentored. To some level, you would want something similar to JLint, IntelliJ IDEA's critics, or Package Structure Analysis Tool, which analyze the entire code base to report on a variety of issues.

But in reality we do not need yet another tool to analyze code, but rather a tool to analyze the diagrams and designs to improve your relationships between classes and extending the diagrams in the future, such as recommending the Proxy pattern, recommending against inheritance, recommending an interface, and other such issues. But in order to do this, you need a lot more information than is probably in a diagram alone, let alone the artificial intelligence to analyze this information.

For this, though, there is still no replacement for working and collaborating as a team. The members of your team should know your domain well, and therefore be the best critics for the design. Furthermore, each member of the team has different experiences, and this can lead to a better design, as the members of the team can discuss their perspective and experience to change the design, and there really is nothing like direct experience.

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