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Discussion on: Do developers still need UML?

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sdesyllas profile image
Spyros • Edited

In reality I believe that UML is rarely used in any workplace and I assume it is related to an agile environment vs a waterfall way of thinking. Waterfall encourages UML as you can spend days and weeks designing the whole project in diagrams and trying to explain every aspect in the application. On the other hand in an agile environment where the iterations are so fast you barely find the time to design uml diagrams and evaluate them as the requirements as constantly changing by the business stakeholders. The only place where I used UML in the past extensively was in a university.
What I find useful even in an agile environment is the use of sequence diagrams to understand the complexity of some systems. But class diagrams, I don't see them in any real project scenario whatsoever.

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rafalpienkowski profile image
Rafal Pienkowski • Edited

So we can assume that Agile is killing UML :) I'm just kidding. I agree that UML is useful when we're working in waterfall (as I had in my previous work).

Something I miss in Agile is that developers are forgetting about documentation creation at all. They are excusing himself

because we're working in Agile there is no need to have good documentation, we'll improve that in next spring etc.

And on the end of a day we haven't any documentation.That approach is in my opinion wrong.

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Simon Brown

Yes, although it sounds very stereotypical, I see this all the time where "agile" teams don't have any documentation (often because they claim that the code is the documentation, which it isn't). This is simply a misinterpretation of the manifesto, and agile in general.