Automatically generated Class Diagrams using Maven & UMLGraph
Drawing Class Diagrams preemptive is sometimes nice to optimize your thought of design. But it will still most likely change in the development phase. Since your Class Diagram is part of your documentation it should be up to date all the time. There is no point in having a Class Diagram if the code does not fit it. You could keep adapting the changes to the Class Diagram by hand, but that can get very time-consuming and exhausting. You should rather automate that process, and there are several ways to achieve exactly that. You could for example search for a UML Class Diagram Tool supporting roundtrip engineering. There are some commercial, and even some free ones available. Not all of them work very well and it can be a frustrating task to figure out which way to go. You would probably try out some and throw them away because they are just not what you expected. Thats why i want to show you a different approach: Letting a Javadoc Doclet draw the Class Diagrams in build phase and embed ...