And thus I have to learn UML!

Yes, that is true! I have to learn UML. And not just learn to read and understand the diagrams, but to be able to create some complex ones! God help me. We need it for our Modern Methods in Software Engineering Course. Actually, that is something that supposedly I had to have learnt during bachelor studies (during the Software Engineering II course). But since I didn't budge at that time, I am almost an illiterate in this language.

Reading the specifications, it may seems to be easy in the beginning, but the hard part is when you actually try to draw one of the diagrams. Everything is vague and depends solely on your judgements. For example you have to decide whether a wheel and a bicycle have an aggregation relation or a composition relation! What could be called an entity and what could only be called an interface, etc.

The other problem is the choice of the tool. There are many UML tools out there and I have not managed to mak up my mind on which tool I'm going to use. My candidates at the moment are: ArgoUML, but it is java based; Poseidon, which is a good tool, not quite free and has problems with C++ as well; Rational Rose, it is perfect, but not free; Umbrello UML, it does everything and the interface is quite nice, but it is a KDE application. You may wonder why that could be a problem, well not a problem for me, but apparently it is going to be a problem for my teammate!! (A comparison list of UML tools if you are interested, it is in German though!)

Anyway, I always used to claim that I'm fond of learning new languages, however obscured they may be. I have to add an exception here, to exclude modeling languages!