Software Engineering Week 3 - UML could work out

Week's notes

The focus for this week was running into problems with a bunch of Java technologies to prepare for our upcoming group project. If we ran into these basic problems in week 5 then we would be out of luck. Instead we should be able to make a deliverable over several iterations. This week by making a hangman game with servlets and jsp files we demonstrated the key pieces needed to build a web app as a team. Key problems included loading two resources types from the server to display in dynamic pages and saving different game states per user. User input was also included but that was in earlier homework so not super critical.

UML  - A bunch of different types of diagrams with one language

At first glance it might seem like UML is going to be some niche way of making software diagrams, like using google drawings or custom drawing apps. Before you know it maybe you're up and running trying to make diagrams with UML to solve problems without knowing what's really up. That's how I felt until seeing that UML could be really useful. The surprising part to me is that there are so many diagram types that are all written in this language. Until today looking at these diagrams I wasn't sure what was going on and a little frustrated when new diagrams that claimed to be UML looked so different from each other. I think this is due to a resistance to be sold on a new keyword or language until it settles in. 

Design Patterns - they have some names

Remembering the names of design patterns seems pretty tricky. My interest is in the shapes that you see in software and matching the patterns to have a clean flow. So I look forward to studying more of these shapes and looking at sample design patterns.