4 ms·

Isn't UML about conceptual thinking first, before you loose yourself in editing?

• petsfed 3y ago
  That was my take on it. How do you get students to practice the process of thinking conceptually first, then evaluate how thorough the planning is, without some tool like UML? Its one thing to lecture your students on the necessity of planning ahead. Its quite another to evaluate whether or not they know how to plan ahead. Granted, UML is not used hardly anywhere, but I must've learned 30 different specific software tools in college that I never used outside of college. However, I've used something like each one of them. I took a technical drawing class in high school and I still use some of the techniques I learned in that, even though absolutely no one uses t-squares, triangles, and actual paper in modern technical drawing today. There's a fair argument re: how much planning and conceptualizing should be done ahead of starting the Agile process, and also a fair argument re: what that planning should look like (crude flowchart? UML-compliant class diagram?). But in rejecting the UML tool, are we rejecting also the idea of advanced planning too? Like, how completely do you need to reject advance planning that it takes the Agile loop to reveal that the customer actually needs software that uses an observer pattern?