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I use Rational Rose at work to model UML. It's not the nicest tool in the world to use, but it was the best at the time we were looking for something to use (1998). I really hate it, and would love to move to something else but I haven't found anything that works well enough with C++ and has good enough reverse engineering for our needs, being able to update a model through reverse engineering for one which is something that makes all those nice Visio licenses we got with Visual Studio useless. We also use other Rational tools, like Requsite Pro (requirements management) and SoDa (report generator), but they're pretty crap too. Requsite Pro corrupts too much and doesn't support having the origional baseline customer documents change well enough which is something you have to accept will happen in the real world. SoDa is just terrible, you build templates in Word and then let it run to pull together your UML, requirements and the like from all the other Rational tools. The problem is you can corrupt your template too easily and it takes far too long to run. Call me fickle but I don't think 24 hours is an acceptable time to wait for a design document. And don't get me started on the test tools. Anybody who can write a tool that has a plugin mechanism that is never going to work properly because they didn't know about the rules about memory management across DLLs is not somebody who I want to use test tools from. Mind you the forgot to implement a way to get which tests are associated with each requirement from SoDa too so they obviously never thought about the software at all.
OK, now I've ranted a bit I'd like to ask the people who read this a couple of questions. What are Rational doing? The have XDE, a Java and C# UML tool which is useless to me since I need C++ as well. Rose hasn't received any major changes in a couple of years and I'm beginning to wonder if they plan to continue developing it any more. They haven't even bothered to keep it up to date with the current versions of UML. The upshot is that we're looking for new UML and requirements management software. Anybody have any suggestions? We've already replaced much of our code documentation with Doxygen and so we just need to create and maintain UML documents for that.
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12:13:36 PM 
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