Organising Views, Packages and Diagrams in EA

[shnplr]

Hi, I just want to know what is good practice for organising uml diagrams inside EA.  I read a pdf tuturial on the EA site which starts off creating package diagrams (custom) and sub-packages under a "Functional Specs" View.

OK...cool...now what?  (I identify about dozen packages)

Now I want to do some real Use-Case diagrams, where should I put them, should I duplicate all the pacakes into the Use-Case view?, should I put them with the package diagrams in "Specs" view?  should they be linked together somehow?

I'm knew to EA/UML, I want to start doing some diagrams but I also want a well organised model within EA

Does anyone have some basic/early-on approaches I could try?

[michael_rainwater]

These are my own tips, and they may not apply to your situation.  So, you can decide what applies to you.

First, I am very interested in document generation.  I find that my final output is very important.  We have some models which we use to generate code, and some we use for docs.  It depends on the level of the design we are doing.  I primarily deal with high level designs that affect multiple systems, and therefore I usually build models for document generation.  When we are doing models for code generation, we tend to organize things differently.

I am hoping to use the 5.0 version to transform some of my high-level designs to something that could be used more easily for code generation.  But, I'm not there yet.

So, these tips are only relevant for things like use case models when I am generating a document.

• My major rule is never create 2 elements in the model when they are the same thing.   If I need to express a system on a class diagram, and then on a sequence, I drag from the project explorer to my diagram.  I do not create a new element in the diagram.
  
• Create an "Actors" package and place all actors for use cases in this package.  I may or may not create a diagram, but I drag the actors from this package to my use case diagrams.
  
• Use packages for logical organization.  I also place notes on the packages and these show up nicely in the documentation.  I think of packages like I do sections of the document.  Inside section 1 is section 1.1, 1.2, etc.
  
• Place all elements I don't want included in the document in seperate packages.  I can then mark these packages to not be included in the diagram.
  
• I always create a "Recycle Bin" package and drag stuff here I intend to delete.  I delete it if I really feel like it, but mostly leave the stuff in it.   I'd rather remove to recycle bin than actually delete things.