Death by UML

As is well known, HL7 v3 follows, in some uncertain way, an object-oriented developmental methodology modelled on the UML approach. The essay "Death by UML Fever" by Alex E. Bell of the The Boeing Company throws interesting light on UML, which may help us in understanding also some of the peculiar phenomena associated with HL7:

UML fever: A potentially deadly illness plaguing many software-engineering efforts today, the most important strains of which are:

Blind adopter fever consists in a loss of judgment on the part of software engineers "when it comes to assessing appropriate usage of available technologies and processes for their own programs. ... Engineers afflicted with blind adopter fever have been observed to blindly force state machine semantics into all of their classes just so they can take advantage of forward engineering technologies that convert UML diagrams into code. ... A side effect of using such processes is wasting time and money on producing many unnecessary artifacts."

Curator fever: "Much as a museum curator has a fascination and passion for paintings, those in the software engineering realm afflicted with curator fever have a similar absorption in UML diagrams. This absorption is fueled by curator fever's propensity to delude its victims into believing that production of UML diagrams, as opposed to the engineering content behind them, is the single most important activity in the software-development life cycle. A commonly observed behavior by those in the grips of curator fever occurs when domain analysts create volumes of use-case diagrams but remain oblivious to the fact that the most important artifact of use-case modeling is developing the supporting text. UML interaction diagrams with messages analogous to 'solve world hunger' between objects are of little value to any stakeholders."

Desperation fever is associated with project traumas such as slipped schedules, low productivity, and poor product quality. "A symptom of those plagued with desperation fever is flattened ears that result from spending inordinate amounts of time on the telephone speaking with vendors in search of products that will solve all known project woes. ... The severity of desperation fever typically escalates as the result of highly paid consultants telling afflictees that newly purchased products will not bring benefits without major overhauls to existing software-development practices."

Open loop fever: "The effects of open loop fever stimulate the urge for rampant creation of UML diagrams with no traceable objective or having no obvious stakeholder. Victims of open loop fever believe that the act of creating UML diagrams alone is a guarantee of value-added activity. Clinical research has suggested that individuals most susceptible to open loop fever are those who have never been end users of UML diagrams and those whose ride on the software life cycle has been very limited."

Gnat's eyebrow fever is recognized "by a very strong desire to create UML diagrams that are extremely detailed. ... afflictees of gnat's eyebrow fever emphatically believe that it is important to model to very low levels of detail because doing so increases the probability that the resulting code will be more correct. Because of variables such as flux in system requirements and dependent design activities occurring in parallel, for example, the time spent on low-level modeling is often better applied to actual implementation. Clinical research has shown a high affliction rate of gnat's eyebrow fever in those modelers who have not actually participated in coding activities."

Round trip fever: "a complete loss of the ability to use abstraction as a means of managing the complexities of software design."

For Bell , the above maladies derive not so much from problems with UML itself, but rather from poor process, no process, or sheer incompetence of its users. For more background regarding UML itself, however, see Bertrand Meyer, "UML: The Positive Spin".