How good are our Mental Models?

I spent many years working with UML models in the 1990s. At that time, the hope was that software development, centered on a model, was the future of programming. It was thought that model and code were simply two views of the same system and that they could be kept synchronized. The actual progress of software development practices hasn't quite worked out this way. However, there are places where model driven development has been successful. And, there are modeling tools such as Rhapsody that are development environments for creating a complete application.

Most people think that Lattix is great for code; many know that it works with frameworks and database; however, only a few (including Peter Varhol) know that Lattix also allows you to work with UML models. Since UML is already a rich visual modeling language why would you want to look at UML models from within Lattix?

Just like code, large UML models are created by teams of developers; and, just like code, they can be hard to understand and maintain. Lattix allows me to capture the big picture view of these models, identify undesirable couplings, create new structure and measure the new model – all in a short time.

Furthermore, what is interesting about a UML model is that it frequently includes additional artifacts such as use case diagrams, sequence diagrams, requirements etc. Many of these abstractions reflect our mental model, but since many of them do not relate directly to code elements, we never really get to see how well defined they are.

This is a DSM for of a Rhapsody model that has been around for a long time. The coupling issues become readily apparent when you see it in Lattix.

Some could legitimately argue that if our mental model is not what is implemented then we shouldn’t really care. This is largely true – but the model that is expressed in UML is actually created for the purpose of development and has a strong influence on what is actually implemented. A sequence diagram may just be a picture initially but could end up as a specification for an implementation.

Having looked at hundreds of UML models, I must conclude that even if the code was an accurate reflection of our UML model, we would still have many of the same problems that we have today with software development.