8.8 Conclusions

Without a doubt, UML is the industry standard for documenting software architecture and design information. In addition, it has the momentum to continue to evolve and change to maintain its status while growing to address any existing shortcomings. However, to achieve the benefits of UML modeling, an investment must also be made in the development of object-oriented software development methodologies and processes. Also needed are team leaders savvy enough to keep the focus continually on UML products to aid communication across teams and with the project stakeholders as much as or more than interteam communications. The key benefit of using UML is that it is applicable across the software industry major methodologies, specifically the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and eXtreme Programming (XP) including Agile Modeling (AM) and MDA.

Most teams could probably benefit from a self-assessment of their own capabilities prior to wide-scale adoption of high-end UML and MDA products and services. For example, if the team does not currently document its existing processes, capture requirements, and ongoing changes to requirements or have a configuration management tool in place, the team may be better served by working on these basic process improvement areas prior to committing to the resources required for MDA development. Most development teams can achieve greater benefit from moving toward MDA incrementally over many development cycles rather than attempting to abandon their own approaches and relying exclusively on the methodologies described as part of an MDA approach.