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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

#171

Post by peanut-walrus »

dahwolf wrote: post #158

In some ways, software development practices have degraded since that era. It largely has to do with the need for speed which comes at the expense of careful consideration, quality, integrity and the formal standards that support it. In fact, I believe it pretty much killed the profession of software architect. Many teams had it as a dedicated role, and this indeed would be a person documenting/designing systems usin…

Software architects, much like real architects, often end up with absolutely beautiful elegant designs which are unfit for purpose and have leaky roofs.

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#172

Post by ofrzeta »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #45

Sequence diagrams were not original to UML. Sadly, I cannot remember the method they stole it from. I do remember it was created by a man working for Hewlett-Packard in Britain who published a book around 1993. Does anyone remember?

"UML 2.0 Sequence Diagram is strongly inspired by the ITU-T MSC"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_sequence_chart

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#173

Post by tempaway12754 »

TheCondor wrote: post #82
civilized wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the university teaches outdated useless stuff? My guesses: - For the university, it fills out offerings and takes up credit hours, keeps the tuition dollars flowing - For the teacher, it's something they already know how to teach, so it doesn't require nearly as much effort to teach as something more useful but maybe less familiar - Universities are trusted with the decisions of what to teach and don't face much…

"Useless" is a strong word. Definitely a bit less useful than intended though. Before UML, it's hard to capture the state of corporate software development that allowed the insanity to take part. I mean, UML was the marriage of two different approaches to drawing object models that were locked in a battle: OMT and Booch method. There weren't tons of open forums for discussion and debate like the internet has now, the…

[flagged]

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#174

Post by jt2190 »

beyonddream wrote: post #167
dahwolf wrote: post #158

In some ways, software development practices have degraded since that era. It largely has to do with the need for speed which comes at the expense of careful consideration, quality, integrity and the formal standards that support it. In fact, I believe it pretty much killed the profession of software architect. Many teams had it as a dedicated role, and this indeed would be a person documenting/designing systems usin…

I am curious to know what are these “formalized architectural decision making methodologies” ? Any books that u know of that cover these topics ?

“Rational Unified Process” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_unified_process

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#175

Post by huydotnet »

Sequence diagram is not the only useful thing. A mix of component + flow diagram can be helpful to sketch out architecture ideas too.

I use diagrams a lot at work, to the point that I get tired of drawing or writing UML code, so I built a text-to-diagram tool [1] to help translate ideas in my mind into diagrams. Quite fun to use.

[1]: https://chatuml.com

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#176

Post by commandlinefan »

neilv wrote: post #76

Thinking "the only good thing" is understandable, since there's a lot of noise, but that talk discourages people from learning a lot of good stuff that's buried. Before UML, there were many methodologies. UML was started by a unified team of some of the most noted OO methodologists. There was a lot of good thinking, but one of the adoption problems we had before UML (as tools developers and methodologists) was that m…

I like the class diagram notation, although I get frustrated at the tendency to try to auto-generate it, which ends up including way more detail than is useful.

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#177

Post by bigbillheck »

auggierose wrote: post #81
cubefox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who say "UML is useless" basically say "diagrams are useless". Which obviously isn't true. The alternative to UML is everyone inventing their own "diagram language" when they want to visualize something. Moreover, I think comparing different UML diagrams can also be enlightening for university students. E.g. state machine digrams look quite similar to activity diagrams, but the former emphasize states and the…

The nice thing about visual stuff is that it is self-explanatory. Instead of needing to read a book about UML first, maybe just use some prose in addition to your diagrams, and you don't need UML at all then. That's also more flexibel.

> it is self-explanatory

It most certainly is not.

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#178

Post by _proofs »

dahwolf wrote: post #158

In some ways, software development practices have degraded since that era. It largely has to do with the need for speed which comes at the expense of careful consideration, quality, integrity and the formal standards that support it. In fact, I believe it pretty much killed the profession of software architect. Many teams had it as a dedicated role, and this indeed would be a person documenting/designing systems usin…

while i feel as if i largely understand what you're pointing out, i kinda want to offer my own speculation as a SWE who is very guilty in thinking in terms of sequence diagrams (and also more formal UML) -- sometimes UML is so fucking bogged down with (impl) details, i am just over here going "i don't give a shit about the (impl) details, i just want to know the abstract concept(s), and logical flows, and focus on necessary system interactions" -- bc i can (and should at this stage) worry about (impl) details later.

i prefer to reason about a system and component relationships using, say, a single word as representation, instead of glaring at one or many inheritance directionals, interface details, and other "field" information, which is usually conveyed in a UML node.

i do not think the lack of formalism is a degradation -- we work with abstractions after-all, so it makes sense to further leverage that fact and express things simply, at a high-level, and straight-forwardly -- you can pack a lot into a single word.

of course as the nature of any tool, there is a time and a place for its application. but i don't think it is fair to call it a degradation.

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#179

Post by lainga »

dahwolf wrote: post #158

In some ways, software development practices have degraded since that era. It largely has to do with the need for speed which comes at the expense of careful consideration, quality, integrity and the formal standards that support it. In fact, I believe it pretty much killed the profession of software architect. Many teams had it as a dedicated role, and this indeed would be a person documenting/designing systems usin…

Has anything replaced UML? I mean, if there are teams out there that aren't shunning design, what do they use to create architecture diagrams?

Re: Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development

#180

Post by opportune »

dahwolf wrote: post #158

In some ways, software development practices have degraded since that era. It largely has to do with the need for speed which comes at the expense of careful consideration, quality, integrity and the formal standards that support it. In fact, I believe it pretty much killed the profession of software architect. Many teams had it as a dedicated role, and this indeed would be a person documenting/designing systems usin…

That’s because software architecture is something any senior employee should be able to do, and it’s not as important as people thought.

Like many abandoned corporate practices, I think it was abandoned for good reason. It may have made sense under different circumstances, like when you had a large army of cheap offshore devs who could not be trusted to architect a maintainable application.

If I had some ivory tower “architect” trying to interfere with my work I’d be so pissed. Anybody I’ve seen with that title, that wasn’t doing 1P cloud consulting where the title means something different, usually had no clue what they were doing and had been given the title as a soft retirement.

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