Hints and Tips
When you adorn a model with notes,
- Use notes only for those requirements, observations, reviews, and explanations that you can't express simply or meaningfully using existing features of the UML.
- Use notes as a kind of electronic sticky note, to keep track of your work in progress.
When you draw notes,
- Don't clutter your models with large blocks of comments. Rather, if you really need a long comment, use notes as a placeholder to link to or embed a document that contains the full comment.
When you extend a model with stereotypes, tagged values, or constraints,
- Standardize on a small set of stereotypes, tagged values, and constraints to use on your project, and avoid letting individual developers create lots of new extensions.
- Chose short, meaningful names for your stereotypes and tagged values.
- Where precision can be relaxed, use free-form text for specifying constraints. If you need more rigor, use the OCL to write constraint expressions.
When you draw a stereotype, tagged value, or constraint,
- Use graphical stereotypes sparingly. You can totally change the basic notation of the UML with stereotypes, but in so doing you'll make it impossible for anyone else to understand your models.
- Consider using simple color or shading for graphical stereotypes, as well as more complicated icons. Simple notations are generally the best, and even the most subtle visual cues can go a long way in communicating meaning.