silly question - can I draw diagrams by hand?

[David L Wilson]

This may be a silly question, but can I draw the diagrams by hand on paper, then scan them in and include them in my HTML pages? I have been trying out various Eclipse UML plugins, and haven't found anything I like. I'm going to try StarUML next, but it seems like it would be relatively easy to just draw these diagrams out, rather than learn and fight with a UML tool.

[Teja Saab]

While the exam does not require you to use any particular tool (or any tool for that matter) to draw your UMLs, it is assumed that you will be using a tool to create your UML artifacts. Also, the UML tool that you will use for architecture on real life projects is not just for pretty picture creation. It has a lot of added benefits such as ensuring compliance with UML standards, pointing out obvious design flaws, generating code skeletons from UML artifacts, reverse engineering existing codebase into UML models for maintenance etc.

Creating a UML model by hand is not recommended except for the simplest of projects. I don't think any commercial enterprise project would fall in this category. Architect a solution for the SCEA assignment in a way similar to what you would do in real life, which is to use a good tool for creating your UML models.

Just my opinion though.....

[K Abhijit]

If you don't like Eclipse UML plugins , you can try few other tools .... there are few open source /trial version available (but functionality would limited)
http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/product/community.html

But i would say don't draw it with hand.... keep it with some tool...

[Mihai Lihatchi]

Of course I used a tool and you need a free one in order to avoid having watermarks in your diagrams. Or to pay a premium price for a commercial tool.
My handwriting skills are not brilliant so .. I dismissed the development by hand.
That being said the requirements are to have a set of diagrams (how are they generated is irrelevant) placed in some HTML files.
If you think you can do it without a major hassle you can always draw the diagrams by hand and scan them when you are done .. but I think it is not very practical when you need to modify.
At work I often draw the diagrams on paper for some simpler problems.
The famous Dijkstra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra) used to avoid computers as much as possible which now sounds weird considering his contribution to computer science .