UML Progress Report

I just finished participating in the OMG meeting in Arlington.  Our work on UML 2.5 is moving along, although more slowly than I would like.  We’ve got a decent scheme for generating substantial portions of the specification directly from the metamodel.  A few people – including me – are re-writing chapters, and we have 6 done so far.  At this meeting we made some valuable decisions about how to organize the chapters, and how to resolve controversies and inconsistencies.  Most likely the end result will be published in 2012.

From an end-users’ point of view, UML 2.5 will be exactly the same as UML 2.4; so you might wonder why we are doing this.  The goal is to simplify and reorganize the written specification so that we have a fighting chance of refactoring it, modernizing it, and generally making it more useful.  It’s an investment to reduce architectural debt, without which any significant new development of UML would be intractable.