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No, UML was not about, nor enabled, lightweight prototyping, the exact opposite. Formal UML as taught and "used" was king of the waterfall and was largely prese

by olliej 4y ago

No, UML was not about, nor enabled, lightweight prototyping, the exact opposite. Formal UML as taught and "used" was king of the waterfall and was largely presented as, and definitely taught as, a "design the architecture of your software, then write the code" model. Hence CASE tools - my universities software engineering courses used a product called Together, and Together maintained _live_ updated UML, but the more important (to those teaching UML) feature was that when creating or changing the UML the code would be updated. People bemoaning the "death" of UML mean the specific and formal standards of notation, many of which were not relevant or even applicable to software. The general diagramming is still heavily used in software development, and despite their claims I disagree with the author's assertion that everyone uses incompatible notation.

swader999 4y ago
Yeah it felt like in UML was shoved down our throats by tool vendors like Rational Rose. The dream of models generating code and systems.
Gigachad 4y ago
I remember using an IDE which would auto generate these kinds of diagrams and for more than the most basic hello world app, the diagram would be this massive spaghetti where you have to zoom way in to see anything.
dwaite 4y ago
Together was a UML-as-code tool, and I never saw how you could deploy a working system using it. We used it for a while, having entire separate 'code' projects to maintain artifacts. One team tried to use it within their project. Together helpfully would delete a bunch of code when someone decided to start over fresh on a diagram. The lesson Together taught me was, sometimes optimizing/automating part of a process is just a bad idea. IMHO, UML worked best when you actually built diagrams to show a relationship or part of a process, rather than treating it as some sort of generated view of the system. A full class diagram for any non-trivial system is a bird's nest. A full sequence diagram conveys nothing to the reader that the code itself wouldn't. There's a reason most repair manuals are illustrated with more than a single exploded view of the full car. Also - Rational was very much trying to break waterfall by going solidly toward more cyclic processes. It was just geared to be a very formal (but adaptable) model. I would argue that Agile was actually still part of an evolutionary chain from RUP - but 'sold' in an entirely different manner.

by olliej 4y ago

swader999 4y ago

Yeah it felt like in UML was shoved down our throats by tool vendors like Rational Rose. The dream of models generating code and systems.

Gigachad 4y ago

I remember using an IDE which would auto generate these kinds of diagrams and for more than the most basic hello world app, the diagram would be this massive spaghetti where you have to zoom way in to see anything.

dwaite 4y ago

Together was a UML-as-code tool, and I never saw how you could deploy a working system using it. We used it for a while, having entire separate 'code' projects to maintain artifacts. One team tried to use it within their project. Together helpfully would delete a bunch of code when someone decided to start over fresh on a diagram. The lesson Together taught me was, sometimes optimizing/automating part of a process is just a bad idea. IMHO, UML worked best when you actually built diagrams to show a relationship or part of a process, rather than treating it as some sort of generated view of the system. A full class diagram for any non-trivial system is a bird's nest. A full sequence diagram conveys nothing to the reader that the code itself wouldn't. There's a reason most repair manuals are illustrated with more than a single exploded view of the full car. Also - Rational was very much trying to break waterfall by going solidly toward more cyclic processes. It was just geared to be a very formal (but adaptable) model. I would argue that Agile was actually still part of an evolutionary chain from RUP - but 'sold' in an entirely different manner.