Has anyone used UML?

[Alan Gauld]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> I took a 3 day class on UML once.  My impression: yet another
> "silver bullet" that doesn't work in real life.  

Like any design notation UML is there to communicate. If 
the peer group is small enough the advantages are marginal. 
If you are working in a distributed group of 20 or more 
programmers something likev UML is near essential. Most 
of my projects involve several hundreds of programmers
(250 on the current one) and there we simply couldn't 
operate without UML.

But a small team UML may be overkill. Frankly I think the 
best bits of UML are the component/package diagrams and 
the deployment diagrams for documenting the physical design.

> thought it was marginally useful, but like any other form of
> documentation, if it's not maintained (and it never is, AFAICT)
> it becomes worse than useless.

It depends on the level that you work at. Architectures don't 
vary that much and are useful for maintainers. But code varies 
a lot so if you try to use UML for documenting code without 
tool support for reverse engineering changes then I agree it 
quickly becomes out of date.

But How else do we communicate design to a new start - it takes 
a long time to read a million lines of code.... UML and similar 
tools cut that time down by an order of magnitude.


Alan G.