In article <w42dnzxof-it6ilnnz2dnuvz8vydn...@bt.com>, lipska the kat <lipskathe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> UML works, non technical 'stakeholders' (yuk) can understand it at a > high level and in my HUMBLE opinion the sequence diagram is the single > most important piece of documentation in the entire software project Yup. Sequence diagrams are the most common one I draw. I'm sure I use the wrong kinds of arrowheads and such, but the general idea is pretty powerful. I find they can be useful for figuring out some horrible piece of code you've never worked with before. Just sit down and start reading the code, drawing the diagram as you go. Sometimes things start to make sense that way when just staring at the code isn't doing it for you. My most successful experiment with UML was when trying to understand some big hunk of C++ somebody had thrown at me. I imported the whole thing into some UML tool, which not only found all the classes, but also sorted out how they were related. Pushing boxes around in the GUI tool turned out to be a useful way to get my head around how the code worked. The problem with UML is that, like so many good ideas, it has developed a mystique around it. With layers of gurus who know progressively more and more about the esoteric details. And who make a living writing books and giving seminars about it. Kind of like patterns, and agile, and scrum, and XP, and so on. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
