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Ask HN: Is UML still relevant today?

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Re: Ask HN: Is UML still relevant today?

#2

Post by smoyer »

I'll admit it ... I drank the UML cool-aid and thought that someday we'd have code-generation directly from the diagrams (we do in part) and round-trip engineering (changes to the code automatically reflected in the diagrams).

Since then, I've become a lot more realistic and use the diagrams when they're the best method of communicating a conceptual or concrete thought. I rarely use class diagrams, but I find myself using sequence diagrams and deployment diagrams a few times a month. Occasionally I also use Use-Case diagrams when there's more complexity than can be easily included in a single user story.

Re: Ask HN: Is UML still relevant today?

#4

Post by jashmenn »

If you learn only one diagram from UML, take the time to understand and use Sequence Diagrams [1].

Being able to break down an interaction into a sequence diagram (especially between 2 or 3 servers) is a powerful thought tool for specifying interactions and its easy for people to understand.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_diagram

Re: Ask HN: Is UML still relevant today?

#9

Post by jfim »

It really depends what you mean by designing UML diagrams. From my personal perspective, UML is mostly a communication language, so that certain abstract concepts (class structures and hierarchies, message passing sequences, etc.) can be communicated using a common language. For example, if two people are to work on the same piece of code or two pieces of code that are to interact together, being able to sketch a quick class diagram or a sequence diagram so that both parties can understand what is happening is much easier than writing it in an unambiguous textual representation.

If you're asking about designing UML diagrams for tools that will automagically generate your application from diagrams, then I think that's definitely a different question. I haven't looked at what the current state of the code generation tools are, but when I looked at it several years ago, it didn't look very promising.

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