The Usefulness of UML

This week, we have started talking about UML (or Unified Modeling Language) in class, and while I can see some of the usefulness of UML, I wanted to see how people actually use it in the context of a workplace environment. So as a part of this, I found a blog post by Lucidchart talking about different types of UML diagrams. While this blog post is made by a company, and they are trying to get the reader to use their product, I don’t think detracts from the usefulness of the post.

So in this blog post they talk about how Agile developers can incorporate UML into their development process, as well as 7 different types of UML diagrams and how each one is useful, and which context it is useful for. It is largely just an overview of these different models, and I know there are more types of UML diagrams, but this gives a fairly good breakdown of what UML is and how it can be used in a more real-world context. I chose this post as I personally found it useful in understanding why anyone would actually want to use UML outside of a planning stage, since you are essentially planning out the whole class structure before you design it, so in my mind why wouldn’t you just write the code? Well this post makes the case that UML makes very good documentation for your code. If you have a class diagram, like the kind we worked with in class, you can use that as a sort of blueprint for your code. So you don’t have to scroll through hundreds of lines of code just to find all of the methods that are in it and how they interact with other classes, you can just look at the UML diagram. They also make the case that UML can be a valuable tool in explaining code to others.

From this blog post, I think I have a better understanding of how UML is (and should be) used in a workplace. There are a lot of different types of diagrams that were shown that I didn’t know were part of the point of UML, as I have only ever seen the class diagrams. But there are many models that fit under the purview of UML, each with different use cases. Some model runtime behavior in a way that it could be easily explained to someone who has no knowledge of programming, and some are able to show how different methods or classes communicate with one another, creating a diagram that can be easily looked at to make sure you aren’t going to mess with interactions in a system by making certain changes. I think that, given the proper context, UML could make a much more significant impact in understanding how we code, and has the ability to explain code to others in a way that even more traditional documentation methods lack.

Source: https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/types-of-UML-diagrams

From the blog CS@Worcester – Kurt Maiser's Coding Blog by kmaiser and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Introduction

My name is Hung P Nguyen, I’m a senior at Worcester State University and majoring in Computer Science with both concentrations in Software Development and Big Data. The focus of this blog would be on the knowledge that I would gain while attending CS-343. Other than that, this blog would also be about me learning new techniques outside of the classroom and being able to adapt to technology. Personally, the most interesting thing that brings out my curiosity is Docker. As a necessity to many developers, Docker is playing such an essential role in their work-life which question me about its existence and practice

From the blog CS@Worcester – Nin by hpnguyen27 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Thoughts on Encapsulation

This post is the result of a discussion in class which revolved around the concepts of polymorphism, encapsulation, abstraction and inheritance. The concepts of polymorphism and encapsulation eluded my group’s ability to elaborate beyond the definition of the word in a dictionary. Trying to explain such concepts by this method would be over simplistic and not helpful in the computer science context, so I decided to research it and write a blog to educate myself on at least one of the terms. The term I chose was encapsulation because I believe it to have ephemeral properties harder to describe than the others.

In the dictionary some explanations of the word encapsulation are interesting. One of the examples talk about setting a permanent cover over contaminated soil. I myself tend to think of encapsulation as a form of nesting –not in the recursive sense, but in a sense, attributes can be placed at different levels inside other objects and so on.     

The aforementioned nested idea says that encapsulation is used to bundle attributes of an object and control access to it. It does that by using access modifiers to control access to classes. An example would be the private access modifier –you can create a private variable in an object and then decide which type of modifications are allowed and how these modifications would work. Once those private variables are created, they can be initialized indirectly by a constructor, but they cannot be accessed directly outside their class. If access is needed, it must be granted in the form of a setter and or getter.

This can be very useful if the information of an object is important and changing it or using invalid arguments would cause undesirable behaviors to the class.

A getter can give access to a variable of importance if needed for any reason, but write access needs to be denied.

A very trivial example would be a constant found that is very useful but should never change, you may need access to it numerous times, but every time you access it you expect it to be the same, and you may not necessarily know what this value should be.  

A setter can also be a way to control access making sure that any change is done purposefully and not accidentally or by side effect during the execution of a program or a task. Some behavior of an arbitrary object may need to be changed from the outside but that’s a hard decision to make, and I believe it would involve investigating the functionality of the object in the context it was meant to execute. 

Looking at the small portions of code we usually work on makes it difficult to understand the necessity for encapsulation. But in large environments outside the boundaries of what we can see or are working currently, there can be countless opportunities to fail from not utilizing good practices for encapsulation.

Encapsulation is like the member of a melodramatic story that you only miss when it’s too late.

[please feel free to point things that are off the mark, missing and or incomplete statements]

From the blog CS@Worcester – technology blog by jeffersonbourguignoncoutinho and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

George Chyoghly Test Post

Posting to confirm functionality for CS 343

Why do this?

  • Because it lets me know if this website works or not
  • Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

From the blog CS@Worcester – George Chyoghly CS-343 by gchyoghly and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Welcome to my blog

This is the blog where I will document all the things I learn and discover about the field of computer science

From the blog CS@Worcester – Sebastian's CS Blog by sserafin1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Introduction: CS-343

Hello my name is Lena Viazmitinov and my major is Computer Science. I will be using this blog for CS-343 coursework and will doccument my progress throughout my final year here at WSU. Good luck to everyone!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by lenagviaz and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Mausam Mishra’s Blog

Hi! My name is Mausam Mishra, i am currently a junior in Computer Science at Worcester State University. This is my introductory blog for CS-343 class and i will be sharing what i learned from this class to the internet.

From the blog cs@worcester – Mausam Mishra's Blog by mousammishra21 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Introducing Myself

Hi, I’m Brendan Lai. This is my CS blog. I look forward to adding this blog with lots of helpful info.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Brendan Lai by Brendan Lai and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS Mission

Some of you may know me and some may not, but I am Sandesh Gurung and I am currently a senior at WSU pursuing a dream of becoming software developer. This is my introductory blog post for CS-343 section 2. I’m hoping to get a lot out of this lesson. It may not be easy, but it is what I most desire at the moment. As time passes, I will continue to update this blog about what I have learnt in this course. 

From the blog cs@worcester – Dream to Reality by tamusandesh99 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The CS Series | Introduction

Welcome to my blog! For the next few months, I am going to be featuring computer science content. Stay tuned for upcoming content!

Andy Truong

From the blog CS@WORCESTER by atruong1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.