6.2. Future Work

The future for Umbrello seems bright with development continuing at a rapid pace. Already, during the writing of this report, there has been a class refactoring assistant added to allow easy manipulation of operations and attributes between classes, and there has been much discussion on an improved code exporter which would stop changes in the files being overwritten and allow for roundtrip software engineering. Umbrello's user base now numbers several thousand and there are about 200 people subscribed to the mailing lists. Between the mailing lists, bug tracker, IRC and being contacted directly I now receive about half a dozen requests for support and congratulations for the programme a day. As part of KDE, Umbrello will now follow the KDE release schedule, including its translation and feature freezes, which will ensure it retains its current level of stability. I hope to take an active part in these and future developments.