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Scott Ambler: OMG not doing a good job

May 04, 2005 12:33:35 +0300 (EEST)

Culled mercilessly from Scott Ambler's post in the Yahoo AgileModeling group:

What does the OMG really bring to the table any more? Their marketing brand? Remember, the OMG isn't a standards body like IEEE or ISO, they're merely a self-appointed industry group. Their ability to get people together? Seems to me that we can do that via the Internet. Their ability to attract the right people? Can we honestly say that the right people are involved with the development of the UML right now?
I'm not convinced that the OMG is doing a good job with UML and I think that it's time for a new approach.
- Scott

I have to say that my recent interactions with the OMG haven't exactly filled me with confidence. UML 2.0 still isn't out, and I hear there are over 500 open issues with the current draft. Talking to people at the top of the OMG, IBM and Eclipse I got the distinct impression that those people no longer separate the three entities much. It looks like we're back to the bad old days when UML was de facto whatever Rational implemented in Rose.

Yesterday I spent the morning with an expert on XMI and XMI[DI] (which stores the positions of diagram elements). The take-up of XMI[DI] is even worse than for XMI: despite its being released in 2003, only one UML tool supports it. If I tell you it takes that tool over 10KB to save the diagram position information of a single UML class with no attributes or operations, you'll probably understand why. A 20-class diagram takes nearly 400KB, of which 50KB is for XMI and the rest for XMI[DI].

Standards are great, but I think they work best when they arise from best practice based on good theory, not when some committee tries to create something without ever having done it in practice.