Has anyone used UML?

[Grant Edwards]

In article <3B1BC755.65510E63 at bt.com>, Alan Gauld 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.

Agreed. All of the projects I've worked on have been small (1-2
people typically, 4-5 max).  Resources are always scarce and
when schedule and budget gets tight, maintining the system and
design description always seems to be the first thing to fall
off the bottom of the priority list.  

  "Just get the fix released to production, and we'll worry
   about updating the documents later..."

>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.

One of the problems I've run into consistently over the past 10
years is when management insists on using "big project"
methodologies on tiny projects.  Their reasoning seems to go
something along the lines of: If one person can do a project
like this in nine months using the "seat of the pants" method,
then if we make him use Flowcharts/SASD/UML/whatever, then it
should only take half as long!

>> 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quickly becomes out of date.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.

I agree that you certainly need something for documenting large
systems.  The fashion in what that "something" is has varied
over the years, and UML seemed as good as anything (certainly
better than some).

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  -- In 1962, you could
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