Ask HN: Thoughts and Experience with SysML?

3 points·thesuperbigfrog··3 comments

Some of our management team is interested in SysML and possible adoption by our engineering teams.

I am skeptical, but do not have any experience with it.

What are your thoughts and experiences with SysML?

I have a little experience from a while back. I’d be curious to know what your management’s stated goal is for it. Simple diagraming, requirements tracing, documentation generation, code generation, all of the above? My experience is that in order for it to provide any more utility than Visio, it requires much more effort than it’s worth. And it’s a much worse diagramming tool.

The believers will claim if you flesh out your system model enough, it can generate at least skeleton code for you. I sincerely believe getting your model to this level of detail and scope would take significantly more time than just writing the code yourself.

>> I’d be curious to know what your management’s stated goal is for it.

I am not sure how deep the management team is wanting to go. I suspect the costs of some of the tools they are looking at are pretty high since all of the websites say "Contact us for a consultation and pricing". Hopefully the costs will persuade them to give it a trial run before they commit to anything.

>> I sincerely believe getting your model to this level of detail and scope would take significantly more time than just writing the code yourself.

This is what I wanted to know.

Thank you for the information.

Link to the Wikipedia entry for SysML for those who are curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Modeling_Language

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