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Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#31

Post by douche »

Probably it is not. I think I'm late enough that I missed the UML wave, and I also did well enough on the AP CS test that I tested out of the CS 101 Java course in college, and got thrown into the Haskell one instead, so I was never forced to do UML.

Once in a while I'll fire up Visio and sketch out a state machine or sequence diagram, but all I'm really doing is throwing down some bubbles or rectangles, drawing some arrows between them, and tacking on some labels. It's nowhere near as formalized as UML, but it works well enough.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#32

Post by arethuza »

I absolutely hate UML and regard the associated tools as time swallowing abominations and the main advocates that I encountered as the worst kind of snake oil salespeople.

Of course, other people's experience may differ - but I largely thought it was a big con.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#34

Post by altharaz »

Good UML diagrams are hard to write, easy to understand.

I used to write a lot of UML diagrams in Mechatronics Engineering for a big company, where specs were not supposed to change often. For projects with a long lifetime and a slow change velocity, UML is totally justified.

UML diagrams are not worth it for Software Engineering: code evolve too fast to keep your diagrams up to date. In that case, I replace UML diagrams by simple sketchs / mockups and simple tables.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#35

Post by dmitripopov »

segmondy wrote: post #21

Yes I do. When you have a team of developers with different model of how the system should work or works, it's usually a recipe for disaster. By modeling, we get to unify our thoughts and idea of the system. When starting out a project, I tend to lean more towards well labeled conceptual diagrams. I will also use activity diagram, sequence and state diagrams. While I have often read about people designing class diagr…

Helpinator already has basic diagram shapes (ellipses, boxes, arrows), and I just think it's enough for a help authoring tool. But the "client" is a bunch of cool old school guys from Australia, they bought an expensive license and plan to use Helpinator both for internal and end users docs, and I just can't say no without arguments. And arguments are that UML is still good for cool old school guys :)

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#36

Post by dmitripopov »

arethuza wrote: post #32

I absolutely hate UML and regard the associated tools as time swallowing abominations and the main advocates that I encountered as the worst kind of snake oil salespeople. Of course, other people's experience may differ - but I largely thought it was a big con.

Rational Rose was terrible at UX, but surprisingly it was a de-facto standard.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#38

Post by scotu »

segmondy wrote: post #21

Yes I do. When you have a team of developers with different model of how the system should work or works, it's usually a recipe for disaster. By modeling, we get to unify our thoughts and idea of the system. When starting out a project, I tend to lean more towards well labeled conceptual diagrams. I will also use activity diagram, sequence and state diagrams. While I have often read about people designing class diagr…

Any tool in particular that you suggest to make diagrams? Or maybe just pen and paper?

I tried StarUML 2 and it's ok but I found it slightly clunky (it also does not have a realtime collaboration feature as far as I know, that would be nice to have when your team is remote IMHO)

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#39

Post by dmitripopov »

eksemplar wrote: post #23

I do, quite a lot actually. Originally it was mostly because it was the default setting in my Enterprise Architect tool, but it's proven more useful than Archimate (and other notations) because people without architect knowledge understands it much better. On the business side it's mainly the system integrations, dependencies and information flows that are of value and you could honestly do them in Word if you wanted…

Would you use UML to show BPs to a competely new user of a system?

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use UML?

#40

Post by slim »

Yes. Everyday. With a pencil on a notebook.

When I take notes, some concepts are better/faster materialized as relationships between objects or actors or activities

Also reasoning about schematics topology is useful and enlightening when a problem is large

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