I thought UML was pretty great when it came out.
It attempted to establish a uniform manner to model
and communicate out software models / systems.
I still think it is great.
People who never learned about UML tend to reinvent
some such thing when they wish to communicate the same
structures and information.
Then you end up with 10 different people drawing approximately
the same information in 10 different forms, and all will
require some level of explanation of notation and grammar
for others to grok it.
A class diagram can contain a lot of rather valuable information.
I do agree that sequence diagrams are great, but if you rip
them out of context and throw the rest in the bin it can only
partially communicate, whereas if you had the object model to
study as well as the sequence diagrams new connections can be
quickly made.
To this day I prefer to create my object structures in a UML
diagram. Plenty of software takes it creates the code, or
takes the code and produces the diagram.
I love creating the diagram(s) when I first start working on an
existing system.
What I have seen of code generation off of sequence diagrams have
bit hit or miss. more miss. But reverse engineering sequence diagrams
can be quite revealing.
I agree completely. I tend to do 'UML light', where I don't worry about the finer details (e.g. marking fields public or private). The best solution is one where I can sketch out the outlines of a class and have some tool automatically generate UML which I can then edit.
And C4 diagrams are great for explaining software architecture, which wouldn't have been possible without UML and esp. class diagrams.
I still think it is great. People who never learned about UML tend to reinvent some such thing when they wish to communicate the same structures and information.
Then you end up with 10 different people drawing approximately the same information in 10 different forms, and all will require some level of explanation of notation and grammar for others to grok it.
A class diagram can contain a lot of rather valuable information.
I do agree that sequence diagrams are great, but if you rip them out of context and throw the rest in the bin it can only partially communicate, whereas if you had the object model to study as well as the sequence diagrams new connections can be quickly made.
To this day I prefer to create my object structures in a UML diagram. Plenty of software takes it creates the code, or takes the code and produces the diagram.
I love creating the diagram(s) when I first start working on an existing system.
What I have seen of code generation off of sequence diagrams have bit hit or miss. more miss. But reverse engineering sequence diagrams can be quite revealing.