What on earth is UML?
Posted in NRZEE on August 02, 2010 by Neil Rabin
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So today I had yet another meeting and this time along with the usual brain flexing developers that exasperate themselves on mentioning as many acronyms as possible, I heard one that I not before. I started to pay attention and did the un-think-able. In the middle of a development and architecture meeting, I asked “what does UML stand for?” Developers will never admit to not knowing something, in favour of Googling the answer upon immediate return to their desks. The developer in question (to my satisfaction) didn’t really know what UML stood for and gave a wishy washy answer about modelling our code prior to development.
In short UML or Unified Modelling Language was a big buzz in 2005 when it was launched and was predicted (when in use with development techniques) to improve the development process 10 fold. I love when new methodologies are developed and start making claims about coders almost becoming a thing of the past or increase coders performance 1000 times using our new spangled methodology. I am always cast back to being introduced to ‘Paired programming’ and new way of increasing performance and reducing bugs “10 fold”. Possibly the most wasteful and ridiculous method I ever heard of, where two developers sit side-by-side to advise each other whilst writing. One developer has the keyboard for a period and the other one questions the code as its written. Utter stupidity for companies with more money than sense. One developer types and this ends up with the other looking out the window or going for a walk until it’s their turn, and all for double the price. Back to UML and another world of incredible claims and the almost obliteration of the developer (well almost I said). UML is basically another over complicated way to push developers into one company’s utopian way of developing code. I’m guessing that most of you that read my blog will not have heard of it and for good reason. It’s mainly for architects and project managers to adopt and push upon the development community in hope of showing some signs they are earning their over inflated pay cheque. The article I read about UML, Greg Carter, executive vice president and CTO of Metastorm (a provider of architect software), believes that UML is a little less of a hot topic because “application development is changing and people are using modelling now to generate executable applications as opposed to generating code, and that is just a fact”. Carter later went on to say “I think the generating of code is getting a little passé”. Perhaps Carter should learn a little phrase called “talking your own book”, a trading term where you only support ideas that will help your trades. Coding a little passé, I mean how does Carter think his generating code software was developed! And this is a CTO, wow! It’s these kinds of architects and theorists that come up with a method such as ‘paired development’ or UML and it’s these people that promote them. Ask any developer, they are just an old development method wrapped up in pretty packaging to impress a CTO enough for them to write about it (or even worse, badly quote on it), or force it upon their poor minions.
My customers are some of the richest, fastest growing and cutting-edge technologists in the world. We predominantly work with investments banks with exorbitant budgets. They don’t use UML and I am not likely to advice them to do so in the near future, unless someone turns down the temperature to hell by some considerable amount.
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