Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
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Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#2Sequence diagrams really shine when you’re documenting different parts of a system and the various ways these parts interact with each other.
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#3I like the arrow semantics: Dashed with line tip is „depends on“. Straight with triangle tip is „inherits from“. Standardizing them is useful.
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#4I'm still waiting intently for debugging tools to be able to create * object * diagrams of an running app. Debuggers are excellent, but I keep forgetting, if the object in question is @Hdj637 or @HU83NS
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#5I just referenced the concept of multiplicity in the values of pytest fixtures a single fixture may return just yesterday and I referenced it in the context of UML to make my point. Numerical distinctions in instance counts and collections and what not is a valuable articulation I think UML encapsulates. Maybe there’s other ways to communicate this concept but if someone talks of multiplicity in software design UML is directly where my mind goes.
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#6I discovered FMC some time ago, and it really feels "UML, the good parts".
Fundamental Modeling Concepts http://fmc-modeling.org/
Used consistently it really helps a lingua franca across teams. Which was the UML aim all along, but it got caught in into "Enterprise Bloat" (like SOAP or XML)
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#7This title and article feels plucked out of my brain. Most of my work is a lot of integrations and the best way to get a room full of devs to get what is going on is via sequence diagrams. Every other method, formal or made up, is weak compared to a basic sequence diagram. You can expand from there if needs be but I find it gets people thinking in a more complete way, gets the details out and what ifs and what abouts, and then you have a nice target that teams hit with very high accuracy and completeness.
It is one of the few (only) diagram types that is easy to draw and fairly close to the real world implementation. Most other formal approaches are wonky abstractions that only true practitioners can make sense of.
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#8Spot on, I agree that sequence diagrams are super useful, I see them used all the time in FAANG.
I do really wonder why UML is still taught in universities, as the article states, it's pretty useless. I took a masters Software Engineering course at Georgia Tech two years ago and a big part of the class was learning UML. That time was mostly wasted as I've never used any of it and never met anyone who has used it.
It wasn't my first time learning it either, we also had a section on it in my undergrad software engineering course. So I learned the same useless stuff twice.
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#9Although I never use any aspect of UML in my work, I absolutely benefitted from learning it. Learning how to model things in UML required me to change the way I broke down and formalized problems and solutions. That change stuck with me, and I've very much benefitted from it, for the rest of my career.
Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
#10UML is also really useful for modelling relational databases