When you are doing programming projects solo, do you use UML or other diagrams? What diagram types do you find most useful, or do you feel diagrams are unnecessary when working alone?
Do you use UML or other diagrams when working without a team?
I feel that code structure diagrams are unnecessary, period.
Basically this.
At best I'll sketch out relationships/structure on a pad of paper (not using UML or anything, just boxes and arrows/lines) while designing a system but once that is roughed out and I'm up and running it becomes out of date reasonably quickly.
Same.
I will napkin-diagram a couple of possible relationships between systems to figure out how I want to arrange things, but that's basically all.
UML stands for "Useless Modeling Language."
I will napkin-diagram a couple of possible relationships between systems to figure out how I want to arrange things, but that's basically all.
UML stands for "Useless Modeling Language."
When you are doing programming projects solo, do you use UML or other diagrams?
I want UML to die in a pit of suffering, poop, tears and fire. I despise it, and all that it entails. All the culture that surrounds it, all the "software engineering" processes developed around it. Fucking. Hate. It.
Then again, a lot of thought has been invested into UML. So it has its uses, for some people. I'd say class diagrams and entity-relationship diagrams are a nice tool IF you feel like doing them in the first place. I feel they're nice when you can have other people do the diagrams for you. You'd probably make their life miserable though.
For me? I don't like them. I only use them on uni courses when they're mandatory. I enjoy thinking about abstractions, how classes interact, etc. UML takes away all the fun I have while coding.
+1 to all that has been said against UML.
I personally prefer when documenting a stable API, to make basic diagram (not formal like UML) explaining the flow of the data between the interfaces, a few key relationships and key processes. Just something that gets the general picture for my users. Much friendlier.
I want UML to work, but I haven't really seen it work.
I haven't ever tried it for solo projects.
I do find back-of-the-napkin sequence diagrams for tiered services to be pretty useful. In this day and age of highly-scalable free-to-play cloud-based online games and the influx of Web Brogrammers to gaming, we might start seeing more UML. Sad.
UML gets a lot of hate. A few companies tried to use it as a code generation tool, and it failed pretty hard. However, it was originally designed as a communications medium, and it does that job really well.
When you need to show someone how five or ten classes are related to each other and how the produce and consume each other, UML is wonderful. When you've got to show a non-technical person how the systems work together, spending ten minutes in Visio putting together the charts can give those people a clear understanding. This is especially true when trying to get money without having an actual product in hand; diagrams that show you've thought about things helps to show that you've at least given some thought to the parts that are involved.
And networking. Whoo baby. UML communications diagrams and sequence diagrams are pictures worth a thousand words. When you want to document how various entities communicate on a network, you can draw up a few state machines, some communications diagrams, and a few sequence diagrams, and then everybody on the team can understand what gets communicated across the network, when, and where. A small packet, five or six printed pages, keeps people from screwing up the networking too badly.
Yes.
For solo projects sometimes I sketch class diagrams when I cannot figure out the structure easily... for complex architecture can really make things clear before starting to put out code.
I do not use them or save them as documentation, though.
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