UML tool: plugin vs. standalone

Question

We use Eclipse in our company and are looking for a UML tool.
What is better: A plugin or a standalone tool?
Or do you have any other ideas (what is important concerning an UML tool)?

Answer 1

I am a beginner in UML and programming. But I tell you my opinion.
What you suggest any painting tool could do (except the reverse engeneering for documentation of the design).
I think it would be handy to have most information (UML and of course source code) available inside the IDE. So I prefer a plugin.
If you need to maintain a component, you have everything together: analysis diagrams and design diagrams, all accessible with the IDE. So you waste no time using another standalone tool looking for the UML documentation or even make errors because of that extra effort. We have many packages and our components are spread across different packages.
I think forward engineering is useful. Many of our programmers are inexperienced with UML. If they have a tool with roundtrip engineering then this helps them learning UML because they see the results in the code. Further there is no need to convert the diagram manually to source code (which means spending extra time) because of forward engineering. Its easy to adjust the output code to the team preferences. This can be done with a few mouse clicks in Eclipse.
If the programmer creates and maintains the UML design documentation while he programs a component, then this helps himself to keep track of it. Thus he will be faster finishing his work in my eyes. He will also do less errors because he uses UML to keep track of his work. Our components can be quite complex, using each other in all possible ways.
I agree that it is important to have a nearly perfect roundtrip engineering. It should not be repository based but stored in the source code.
Reverse Engineering is limited in most tools to class diagrams. But reverse engineering can be also applied to sequence and collaboration diagrams.
And if a UML tool supports requierements engineering it helps you to locate the piece of code very easily which you need to change if you have to do a software change.
I used Poseidon free edition to reverse engineer a component. It was uselesst to me. We use a framework to create components and the components are spread across different packages. It is not possible in Poseidon to import a few classes and let Poseidon import also all classes which are connected to the imported classes. Difficult to explain. With TogetherWSE the Job was much more easy to create a "after work" UML documentation. Futhermore Poseidon lacks of many features of UML.
We start to build a ERP with a framework we bought and which still is in development. The documentation is not good of the framework. I want to use a tool which helps me keep track of the very complex components we will have to program so that I don't drown.