UML 2.0

[Jim Barrow]

Last Thursday our Tech Pubs group received a request to start using UML 2.0.
The reason for this is that the head of the engineering department wants to
generate code from these UML diagrams.  This is the premise.  Here's the
background.

For the past year our Tech Pubs group has documented use cases for the
engineering department, both business and system.  In each of these use case
types we've included UML diagrams - activity diagrams in the business use
cases, and component diagrams for the system use cases.

The head of engineering is, well, not that bright - his grand ideas seem to
come from what read in the latest computer magazine.  This is the guy who
wanted us to develop our end user documentation as a wiki, and also asked
that we save our documents as Word 2007 docs, even though no one else in the
organization used Word 2007.

To make matters worse, he's told the CTO that the Tech Pubs group can
generate source code UMLs from templates within Visio or from within
FrameMaker 8.

No, I am not kidding.

I'll tell you right off the bat, I am not a UML guru.  And I can also tell
you that no one in our entire organization has a tool that can produce UMLs
for source code engineering.

And, after reading some of the UML forums, I can't seem to find a UML tool
that is relatively inexpensive and also supports automated code generation.
Has anyone here ever had to create UML diagrams that have been used to
generate code?  Does this sound like another wild goose chase (see wiki
above), especially since our software product has already been developed and
we're now supporting release two?

Many thanks,

Jim