Comment by chrisseaton

5 years ago

> UML was the swan song of the classic waterfall SDLC gang. Agile and TDD came along and nobody looked back.

Don't the UML and Agile and TDD 'gangs' overlap? Robert Martin has evangelised both.

5 comments

chrisseaton

Reply
throwawayboise  5 years ago

The difference I was trying to highlight is that UML (at least in my experience) was still very much focused on "big design up front" and production of design artifacts (vast numbers of diagrams) that agile and TDD approaches explicitly rejected.

I don't remember rapid iteration being a part of any UML-based methodology that I ever used. By the time the diagrams were complete enough to capture implementation details, they were too unwieldy. Did any UML tools support common refactorings, or would you have to manually change potentially dozens of affected diagrams?

  • chrisseaton  5 years ago

    But that's the point - how are the same group recommending massive complex paper designs up front, and also agile methodology?

    • nick__m  5 years ago

      Opinions and ideologies change over time, here's an hypothetical timeline that explain your question

      ===A====B==C=======>

      A: (around 1997) We are hopeful that the methodology called UML will solve the software engineering problem.

      B: We have tried that UML methodology and it doesn't solve the problem it said it would. We should try something else

      C: (Feburary 2001) We have an ideology based on what we have found to solve the problem in practice, let's make a manifesto.

      1 reply →