UML – Enterprise Architect

We used Enterprise Architect to maintain our software designs, so it was straightforward to try its Business Process extension to draw our processes. Enterprise Architect did the work, it was quite easy to show who does what. It provided solution to keep our document templates just next to their definition, and it was able to track the changes made during continuous improvement. There was only two drawbacks: its price and the lack of acceptable and readable export.

UML – StarUML

UML had led us to success in Enterprise Architect, so we looked for another tool supports UML2, for free. I found StarUML, which is a quite good UML modeling tool, and it is open source. I started to redraw our process models in it based on the Enterprise Architect models. I could draw only the first few boxes to realize that StarUML supports connections only according to the UML standard, while EA was more flexible. It was impossible to create drawings with the same information content.