UML usage and relevance

funkey_monkey

Hi,

I was going to do some training in this - just to brush up on it and was wondering about its relevance in the industry now.

Do many people here use it in their daily job? in my job we have to provide design documentation of all software produced, but very little of it is UML based - even the class diagrams produced do not get imported into the documentation.

So I was wondering if I am wasting my time with it and should focus on something else instead.

Thoughts?

Anima

Don't think it's used at all anymore

funkey_monkey

What design is used instead? How do you document the architecture and design of your software?
I appreciate that it will vary from area to area.

Anima

I'm not really sure what the standard is but in the last few companies I've worked it's basically just been wikis and diagrams with whatever tools available. If you're using Atlassian stuff, confluence has a lot of plugins for that kind of thing.

I guess Agile got rid of a lot of the massive upfront planning like what was done in the era of UML. A consequence being the documentation tends to be lacking unless people actively update it as they go.

UML was pretty useless anyway so no harm.

Talisman

The principle idea of UML is good in that a diagram should be universally understood by people across different teams and organisations. It can provide a quick top-down vision of the software, however unless you have a dedicated solution such as Enterprise Architect, keeping the UML diagrams in sync with the code will prove to be a major pain point.

I see plenty of people draw diagrams to describe problems/code but it's boxes/lines/circles rather than UML.

Anima

Diagrams are great and all but UML is useless for the same reason visual programming languages are not that useful. For a simple application, the diagram is clear and easily understood. For a large application, there is such a rats nest of connections and relations that you can't tell what is going on. At that stage, the textual form is simpler and more concise than the diagram.

Has anyone run a class diagram generator on a large project and really found the output meaningful?

smacl

Anima wrote: »

Don't think it's used at all anymore

It is used, but not always in programming. I came across it very recently dealing with an XML schema for exchanging transport data. If what's being described is reasonably static it is useful.