Depending upon the way you structure your team, you may have only one or two people actually creating diagrams with the product, but everyone—architect(s), programmers/engineers, database experts/DBAs, even the testers—needs to be able to read and have a basic understanding of the diagrams produced.

Either training courses or self-training is required in both object terminology and UML notation, and neither one is particularly cheap or guaranteed effective. As a ballpark you could estimate one to two weeks for a programmer/engineer, one month for an abstrac-tionist, and six months for an architect to come fully up to speed if they are coming from from a non-OOP background. Useful work can be accomplished during this period, and using mentors (either from within the organization or outside consultants) can reduce the learning period.

In addition, the architects who diagram with the Rose product will learn, usually the hard way, the various quirks and idiosyncrasies of Rose itself. For example, in Rose 4.x, if you printed from a diagram that wasn't fully zoomed out, and if you hadn't set the font of the objects in the class diagram just before printing (even if they looked correct), then the actual printed diagram could be mangled in all sorts of interesting and creative ways. Or, in both Rose 4.x and Rose 98, the delete key only deletes the object from the diagram; you must use Ctrl-D to delete it from the model.