Towards Promoting Design and UML Modeling Practices in the Open Source Community

Despite the emergence of UML as the defacto modeling and design tool for software engineering, its adoption remains dismal. Software development, particularly in the open source community, remains code-centric. Adoption of UML in open source projects represents a significant lost opportunity. In this paper, we present an approach to encourage upfront design practices and the adoption of UML modeling in open source projects. In particular, we demonstrate the approach for small contributions and bug fixes. The approach relies on integrating UML-level abstractions into the code. This integration means that open source developers can continue to use their familiar text-based tools to manage the source code and contributions, while at the same time benefit from UML added value of abstractions and comprehension. Other benefits of this approach include broadening the boundaries of bug fix contribution by including modelers and end-users, and incrementally add UML model diagrams into open source project's documentation.