Has anyone tried using uml to design a system that is going to be written in c.

Were working on some embedded systems and doing the coding in C and we want to have some form of design in some reasonable standard format that can be reviewed by others. In the past i've found that uml designs tend to be the easiest to understand once the initial meaning of the symbols is understood.  Obviously we would have to use a subset of uml because there is no concept of public & private and inheritance is near impossible. However concepts like objects and interfaces can be related to structures and common header files.

Has anyone tried anything like this before?



Chris Packham
kriz@i4free.co.nz
 
A thousand mokeys at a thousand machines, it happened, it got called the internet.

> subset of uml because there is no concept of public & private and
> inheritance is near impossible

That statement is not entirely accurate

> However concepts like objects and interfaces can be related to
> structures and common header files.

Absolutely

I would also think you could apply Use-Case, sequence and interaction diagrams. Actually you could use a class diagram to represent a structure and it's associated functions.

"But, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong".
-pete

thanks pete.
Has anyone actually done it on a real system? What happened would you do it again?

Chris Packham
kriz@i4free.co.nz
 
A thousand mokeys at a thousand machines, it happened, it got called the internet.

If you are thinking about reverse-engineering in C - forget about it. We are using Visual-UML in our company. We have spend almost 3 months for evaluation of different programs (Rose, Visual-UML and etc.). Finally we have stopped on Visual-UML. Currently it has weak reverse engineering part, but very strong graphic and description parts. Use-Case decryption is GREAT. I am a little doubt about using reverse-engineering in anything else except interface application or may be some financial stuff so we were looking for a program that will help us on stage of first ideas and design, to transform ideas from Manager to Programmer and trace changes, to always have a whole picture of the project on some level. We are not going into deep with UML, we are keeping it on level of public interface, main data strictures and module relationship. This is because we have dumped ROSE. Rose has strong auto code generation part, but this lead to limitation in UML and it was stopping us to express ideas and use UML as communication language. Currently I see UML as LANGUAGE between programmers, not are C or C++ language interpritator.
We are developing engineering application. It has code written on C and C++, but main part is C.