I think it took around 20 days to come up with the first cut of design. I worked on an average 2 hours a day and on week ends little more. So I guess it took around 60 hours to complete the design. I think that time is really adequate.
Once I have all the diagrams on the paper, I drew them using trail version of VISIO. There are stencils available on net to draw UML2.0 complaint diagrams with VISIO. Many people in the forum suggested other free tools like STAR UML, But I went for VISIO as I had been using it for quite sometime now.
Coming to the diagrams:
1.Class Diagram: I followed the Cade's example very closely when designing my system. I have around 23 classes(Exclusing JSPs). But the number of classes depends on your domain model. There is no thumb rule that says you have to have these many classes in the diagram.
2.Component Diagram: This is very much like Cade's example again. I have modified to suit my problem domain. This is the first time I draw a component diagram in my life. When I checked on net I found very complex diagram unlike the one in Cade's example. So I wasn't sure if my diagram works. But after the result I'm feeling that it was not all that bad
3.Deployment Diagram: I made it little comprehensive compared to the one in the book. I mentioned the hardware profiles on PROD, QA and DEV. Gave couple of points on cloud computing.
4.Sequence Diagrams: Once I have the class diagram, this is pretty straight forward.
5.Risks: I didn't mention NFRs as risks. I mentioned the most important and most likely failures/bottlenecks in the system as technical risks.
Hope it helps.
Regards,
Anil Chowdary K