And I don’t mean with LSD… In a post, Juha-Pekka postulates the following:

• “My personal opinion is that roundtripping is a recipe for trouble. “
• “Still I need to ask what is the value of having a rectangle symbol in a digram and an equivalent class in a file.”

When I first laid eyes on an ad for Together/C++ in 1994 that promised code and diagram were always in sync, I spent $1200 of my own money and bought it sight unseen.

Not having accurate diagrams that represented the code was a problem… Though I had powerpoint templates for Object Modeling and excel spreadsheet templates for sequence diagrams, these always seemed to get out of sync with the code after a while. This is quite likely worse than having no diagrams at all! (Kind of like a map with an error might be worse than no map at all… depending if the road now goes through a man-made lake.)

Think of round-tripping a class diagram as follows:

• edit the code, the diagram automatically reflects the change.
• edit the diagram and the code is immediately updated.

Sounds like a visual editor to me… always in-sync diagram and code.

Much like we represent bytecode and assembly with higher-order languages (i.e., things like source code), another level up of representation of the same thing can be useful.

At least I found in-sync round-tripping useful for the past dozen years. Others’ experience may vary.