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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

#251

Post by eropple »

opportune wrote: post #243
eropple wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I do think that software architecture does matter (though it should probably be somebody with a staff or principal hat, not a specific job title) I recently took a job at a place that really does like architect titles. Mine's even "lead architect". It is pretty funny when somebody runs into me and realizes for the first time that I have the job because I build stuff and write code, not because I'm good at…

Yeah, I guess I would in retrospect refine my opinion to “software architecture is iterable and not completely separable from implementation” or that “architecture (as imagined by distinct architects who are shielded from implementation concerns) is not important”. Principal engineers and such who are still involved in operations, implementation, and more tactical approaches are who I also think are “supposed” to be…

> Yeah, I guess I would in retrospect refine my opinion to “software architecture is iterable and not completely separable from implementation” or that “architecture (as imagined by distinct architects who are shielded from implementation concerns) is not important”.

This, I'd agree with. You have to be at the coalface to know what the hell is going on. At the same time, you have to be cognizant of business needs and why things are the way they are, which is to me a fair approximation of "the job of a principal engineer."

(My other hat here is "head of API governance" and that's largely a business-flavored analysis of APIs being brought onto our company-spanning platform. I couldn't escape having both in my head if I tried.)

> It sounds like you’re doing the better thing of running up and down the layers of abstraction so your contributions empower people rather than disempower them

Ideally, yes. In reality, I work for The Phone Company, and The Phone Company hires a lot, and I mean a lot, of vendor devs. I am doing their thinking for them a lot of the time; the swerve is that I can and do write code (have released moderately popular open-source libraries on their framework of choice, for example) and so the usual development practices of "sure let's make a dozen packages for marginal functionality" don't fly.

I am disempowering them, because ultimately, we will eventually be cycling out our vendors and I will be the one who has to own their output. So that output has to be something I can live with. But this place is Processes Georg and should absolutely not be counted.

(I like the job. I will enjoy when I eventually go back to a shop where the developers have a reason to feel ownership over the work.)

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

#252

Post by bluGill »

peanut-walrus wrote: post #171
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.

And other architects make buildings/software that gets done on time because unlike babies adding people can make things go faster (it is always sub linear, but good architecture can get close to linear, while bad can go negative slope)

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

#253

Post by rektide »

I adore how well this article cites sources at the top. Gold links to let others build the case.

I don't know how important it could have been, but the threads here don't talk a lot about UML being more than just a design tool. We think of it as a way to draw pretty diagrams for documents. And we think of architect astronauts who alas all too often weren't great peers, weren't wise experienced seasoned sages. But there was a subtle current of an idea, that coding might evolve beyond source files of text that were hand authored. Computer aided code.

UML still seems like a potential good/great intermediary target for machine learning to me, or for refactoring. If we could better get UML snapshots of the code & transmogify them into new shapes/states. UML got damned as much as anything because it existed in a pre-predominantly-open-source world, where it was interlinked with wild & complex vendor tools & methodologies, ans these kinds of flexible abstract representation malleable code systems existed in limited/weak forms, deeply tied to ultra expensive 100% proprietary tools, that only a scant % of people who'd touched uml had any knowledge of, and few of them ever really witnessed any tapping the power of these possibilities.

What we think of uml is just a shadow of a bigger idea.

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

#254

Post by rchaud »

svachalek wrote: post #242
contravariant wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we bring back the UI people from that era though? Trying to standardize good software is insane but having a consistent UI with standard elements for all programs that's usable with both mouse and keyboard was kind of nice.

Very nice. There were decades of thoughtfulness and science that suddenly got replaced with "well, it looks cooler".

Struggling to think of any B2B apps whose design could be considered even remotely cool.

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

#255

Post by cubefox »

radicalbyte wrote: post #115
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…

UML as a projection is fine and a valuable tool. Starting with UML to describe a set of classes or - worse yet - an entire system is lunacy and a massive red flag.

What's wrong with describing some classes first with a UML diagram?

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

#256

Post by eropple »

rerdavies wrote: post #233
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…

Ok boomer. :-P Having lived through both, modern development practice is superior in practically every way, most especially with respect to quality. The problem with Heavy Development Methodologies is that they didn't actually work.

Don't take this as an endorsement of BDUF practices and the like, they're as fraught as anything, but it's important to also recognize what modern development practices trend hard towards themselves: the trapping of oneself in a local maximum.

I have a blog post in the works about this but it's not ready to share; in short, I can't help but notice that hyper-focused, optimize-for-time-to-market, minimum-viable-product projects have a real, and frequently killer, problem once you have built your initial, hopefully-better mousetrap. Almost every company I've ever worked for has gotten that initial mousetrap done, tried to expand horizontally to actually have enough stuff-that-works-together to actually sell, and fallen on their faces because that initial super-specific development effort created not just code, but product assumptions that are prohibitive to unwind.

Most of them hit the hillside because reality is no longer playing ball with their (frequently VC-driven) needs to cut scope and ship.

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

#257

Post by cubefox »

yencabulator wrote: post #247
cubefox wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That concept map example is only a loose association of ideas, where the nodes aren't of the same type (e.g. event, state, class etc), or sorted into types, and apparently included quite arbitrarily. Mind maps are similarly loose. UML is for when you want more precise diagrams about a fixed subject matter. I agree on the "shorthands", like empty/filled arrows, that people may not know. But there isn't much alternativ…

That's heavy backpedaling from your earlier > People who say "UML is useless" basically say "diagrams are useless".

Well, if you only allow concept maps and mind maps, then I guess, yes, you don't actually say (all) diagrams are useless. But you are pretty close.

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

#258

Post by tabtab »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #50
tabtab wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? Some try to put too much detail into ER diagrams in my opinion. A Data Dictionary is usually a better place for such details. ERD's should mostly be to illustrate relationships. One trend/fad was to put words describing links between tables, but I usually didn't find such helpful. Maybe if the wording was done well it would help, but most seem forced in practice. Good naming takes experience.…

> A Data Dictionary is usually a better place for such details. Self-documenting code/schemas are an even better place. ...sometimes I feel like I'm the only one in the world who uses DB-level metadata (e.g. `sp_addextendedproperty` in SQL Server) to attach explanatory notes and other metadata to database objects, including columns and constraints - and it gets better because I modified my Entity Framework scaffoldin…

> Self-documenting code/schemas are an even better place

But they don't offer enough columns and detail for certain things in my experience. A shop-rolled data dictionary can be "shaped" like shop needs.

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

#259

Post by bluGill »

starlust2 wrote: post #239
kazinator wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Class, component, package, activity and state machine diagrams are all useful ways to model the structure and behavior of a system visually. I completely agree with you. It's a good way for other people to present information, for me to look at. I just won't do it myself. It's not only me; and that's why it's dead. I won't do it because the first thing that comes to mind is how it will go out of date in a month, an…

> Maybe in the not-too-distant future we will have AI grokking large code bases and cranking out accurate, useful, UML diagrams out of it. > All those diagrams, when they are complete, correct and up-to-date, do convey what they are supposed to convey. I spent a bit of time prototyping this recently. It's definitely possible. Rational Rose also had the capability to generate diagrams from code though. I don't remembe…

The problem isn't generating UML from code, the problem is generating useful UML from code.

Where those boxes are in relation to each other matters. You can't just randomly throw boxes and lines on the page, you need to arrange them so that boxes that we can tell what things are related by how close they are to each other. Automatic UML doesn't capture that.

Sometime you have complexity in code that needs tobe hidden by default. I don't care about rare error cases most of the time, but automatic UML can't know what is the complexity needed for rare cases and what is complexity you need to show the junior on the first day.. related to this when i'm interested in one error path how do you hide the others?

Then the real killer of both. Next week there is a minor requirement change (new features we always knew were coming and planned for even), and now the code changed. UML doesn't follow that. Either you generate UML and have the above problems. Or you manually update UML in theory, but in practice just let it slide as the week after you know something else will change and you don't nees it today anyway.

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

#260

Post by doctor_eval »

snapetom wrote: post #250
doctor_eval wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you both except that architects are alive and well. I worked with an ex IBM architect a couple of years ago. Lovely guy but for someone designing software systems, I found it remarkable that he didn’t know how to write code.

I'd say this is a company red flag if they are still having these people around. About four years ago I was at a company that still had someone like that. Useless and highfalutin, he obstructed many projects thanks to an archaic director who thought he was still necessary. I got out after butting heads with him constantly, and I don't think said company ever shipped anything meaningful in his entire tenure here.

I think you get these people in body shops - companies that basically rent out their skilled staff to other companies. The Architect sounds super important and is the most expensive resource, so obviously they sell it super hard.

When I worked there I was a product guy, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why I didn't fit in... but yeah, I didn't last long.

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