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Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1768470]

Wed, 19 July 2017 08:59

Harald Kornmayer

Messages: 11
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Hi all

I plan to use Papyrus in a lecture for Software Engineering (inclulding UML) as the platform for modelling. I just installed the latest Papyrus version and that works fine so far.

I tried to use Papyrus already in some courses last year, but then I recognized that most students are overwhelmed with the many functionalities of Papyrus. Therefore the use of Papyrus in such course must be based on best practise for using the tool in a real student project.

Is there someone in the Papyrus community who use the tool already in university courses and is willing to exchance some experience?
Or even better: is there already some (Open Source) material available for lectures?

Every contact point would help me at this moment in time.
I'm willing to contribute to such a material.

Best regards

Harald

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Re: Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1768477 is a reply to message #1768470]

Wed, 19 July 2017 09:12

Remi Schnekenburger

Messages: 167
Registered: July 2009
Location: Palaiseau, France

Senior Member

Hi Harald,

You should definitely have a look to the work done by the Papyrus Industrial Consortium, which has been setup typically to help, support and welcome this kind of contributions.

You will find more information there: https://wiki.polarsys.org/Papyrus_IC and I would also kindly invite you to read this subpage: https://wiki.polarsys.org/Papyrus_IC/Research_Academia, which is the perfect match to your question.

Finally, I would encourage you to contact Ernesto and Francis (contact information on the second wiki page), they will be very happy to answer you more in detail.

Cheers,
Rémi

Remi Schnekenburger

Get professional Eclipse developer support:
http://eclipsesource.com/en/services/developer-support/

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Re: Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1768489 is a reply to message #1768470]

Wed, 19 July 2017 12:51

Richard Freggi

Messages: 74
Registered: July 2015

Member

I have used Papyrus to teach 2 courses - one undergraduate system analysis tutoring and another process analysis graduate course.

I selected Papyrus because in my opinion it's the best open source fully 100% UML 2.5 compatible tool available. For my own work I use Sparx Enterprise Architect 13 - it's "almost free" at USD 100 per license. But I don't want to push a proprietary tool to students, and I don't want to ask them to spend more money.

Papyrus was OK for teaching and both graduate and undergraduate level. My observations are that the user interface is optimized for software developers and is just OK for analysis at contextual and logical level; the reporting capabilities are limited to tables unless you start getting into the various plugins that may or may not work to various degrees. Some of the bugs are annoying (Papyrus is still a work in progress, but it's an important tool that needs to reach maturity).

In my experience students are mostly confused by the large number of UML elements in the palette and context menus. One solution would be to develop a UML profile that only shows the classifiers you need for your teaching course.

You are welcome to contact me for more experience sharing.

Richard

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Re: Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1768594 is a reply to message #1768489]

Thu, 20 July 2017 11:38

Harald Kornmayer

Messages: 11
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Hi Remi, Richard
Thanks for the fast response and the links to information. I will have a look to the material and will come back soon.

Harald

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Re: Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1768911 is a reply to message #1768470]

Mon, 24 July 2017 21:07

C. Fuhrman

Messages: 4
Registered: July 2017

Junior Member

Since 2005 or so, I have been teaching an undergraduate OO analysis and design course (loosely following Craig Larman's Applying UML and Patterns book). He's got a great take on UML tools in the book, which is surprisingly still true today, if you ask me.

Most of the modeling that takes place in my courses is "UML as a sketch," and the students are free to use whatever tool they want for the labs. However, on exams they must be able to draw by hand UML that respects the subset of the notation covered in the course/book. I encourage them NOT to use tools for the exercises, so they can learn to model with a pencil (or whiteboard marker). I feel that clicking through menus of most UML tools is counterproductive, especially when everything is new. Layout algorithms are generally bad for most tools. It's a huge time suck to push classes around by hand to make the diagram readable.

PlantUML has been a great tool for doing quick diagrams for most notations in my course. I designed a plug-in for Google Docs called PlantUML Gizmo for the context of my courses, and it's been very useful. I use it for 90% of the things I need to present in a clean way. PlantUML comes up short, however, when you have models with lots of classes.

For example, if I want to show how to reorganize domain models with packages, it's not really possible with a tool like PlantUML. Papyrus seems to do a good job, since the classes are really structured in packages, and it's possible to show diagrams of only certain elements. I have discovered the CSS aspects of Papyrus and it's got potential to approach modeling simplified enough for an undergraduate class. On the other hand, I don't yet have enough examples of models done in Papyrus (undergrads love examples if you want them to use a tool).

My reluctance so far with using Papyrus 3.x is the >500M download (I'm not sure how much bigger it is than 2.x), followed by more than 10 mins to unzip the file on a Surface Pro 4. I think its footprint is too big for an undergraduate class (at least at the start). I'm recommending it to students who are interested in modeling the projects in UML when they have more than 30 classes with several packages. For a grad course, I would highly recommend it.

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Re: Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1769012 is a reply to message #1768911]

Tue, 25 July 2017 16:21

Carsten Pitz

Messages: 113
Registered: May 2015
Location: Germany

Senior Member

10 minutes to extract the Papyrus ZIP-file on a Surface 4 ???
It takes less than 5 seconds to extract the ZIP-file on my 3 year old Sony Vaio Pro13.

10 minutes sounds really strange to me.

Additionally you are allowed to distribute the Papyrus ZIP-file via a memory stick.

Altogether the install job should be done in 5 minutes.

/pica

[Updated on: Tue, 25 July 2017 16:50]

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Re: Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1769024 is a reply to message #1769012]

Tue, 25 July 2017 19:46

C. Fuhrman

Messages: 4
Registered: July 2017

Junior Member

Quote:

10 minutes to extract the Papyrus ZIP-file on a Surface 4 ???
It takes less than 5 seconds to extract the ZIP-file on my 3 year old Sony Vaio Pro13.

Is your Vaio running Windows 10 with the built-in anti-malware software? My Surface Pro 4 is, and I suspect the anti-malware check is part of the reason it takes so long to unzip. But still, 500+MB and 5000+ files is a lot no matter what.

After your comment about 5 seconds, I tried again with the same result - the prediction by windows is 21 minutes, but it finishes in less time finally, around 10 or 11 minutes. I'm using the Windows 10 "Extract all..." function. Here's a screen shot:

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Re: Use of Papyrus in Software Engineering Courses [message #1769066 is a reply to message #1769024]

Wed, 26 July 2017 07:47

Carsten Pitz

Messages: 113
Registered: May 2015
Location: Germany

Senior Member

no my Vaio Pro13 runs Ubuntu 16.04.1.

I know the build-in Windows ZIP file extraction function traditionally was and still is damn slow. If you use 7zip (an FOSS tool) or another ZIP tool available for Windows -- in my experience -- you win at least a factor of 10 in speed.

/Carsten

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