Venkat Sadasivam

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Is UML dead? & What is the future of UML?

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Venkat Sadasivam

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Once upon a time, UML was a highly popular buzzword in the software development industry. It was considered essential knowledge for architects, as understanding concepts like aggregation and abstraction could easily land you a job. However, tools like Rational Rose were costly, limiting their availability to only a few companies.

Over time, the popularity of UML waned, and people began to perceive it as silently fading away. While UML-based design was believed to reduce rework during coding, many developers and companies struggled to integrate it into their day-to-day development processes. Consequently, UML lost its momentum and seemed to disappear.

However, despite its apparent decline, my intuition tells me that UML is not truly dead. It is possible that UML will resurface in the future, albeit with some modifications and under a different buzzword. All it needs is a fresh marketing approach. Currently, most marketing efforts are focused on promoting Agile processes, leaving little room for UML’s resurgence.

I invite viewers to share their thoughts on the potential future of UML. Is there a chance for it to make a comeback? How might it evolve to address the challenges faced in its previous iteration?

8 responses to “Is UML dead? & What is the future of UML?”

  1. Reddy

    Hahahahaha….. u r right upto some extent… :-)

  2. Muthu Velappan

    Venkat,

    I don’t think UML is dead. I believe the industry still uses it but the buzz on UML has got significantly reduced. I believe this is mainly because of the maturity level today.. Knowing UML doesn’t mean that the person is good designer or architect, 2-3 years back that was the case when somebody say they know UML everybody in the top mgmt thought he is a good architect/designer but that’s not the case anymore. As u rightly mentioned in ur Design patterns post, Design or Architect skill is totally different to depicting/communicating it to others. UML & Design pattern helps u in doing the communication part and not on the thinking part. Its the individual ability to think which matters most. Industry has now understood that to decent extent and that’s the reason for less hype on that word.. I believe the same will happen Web 2.0 or 3.0 technologies in near future.

    ~Muthu

  3. Venkat

    Muthu you are right the buzz is gone down. UML has be simplified to make it more practical and easy to adopt for day-to-day technical discussion.

  4. Muthu Velappan

    Venkat,

    It provides so many diagramatic representations out of which I find Sequence/Interaction & Use case diagrams can come in to our day to day activity. Deployment diagram is quite good for the admin person. Other than this I don’t find any major use of doing others. They are good for documentation purpose but on a day to day usage, I don’t think they are adding any value to us…

    Is that what u mean by simplification? Having lesser representations…

    ~Muthu

  5. Venkat

    As per the original idea of UML is model based design. But whereas we use UML to represent our completed design. As code/design evolves we cannot keep the model upto date always.

    I found UseCase and class diagrams are useful. Sequence diagram and activity diagram I don’t like as we can do similar thing with simple flow chart notation.

    I haven’t seen or found deployment diagram useful because most of the case architects tend to choose their own creativity to represent the deployment model.

  6. mikeathome

    Hi Guys, I’ve been working with UML for years and its always been a bit hard to sell because there is so much of it, it keeps growing and there’s no real methodology behind it. Having aid that people still draw use case diagrams and class diagrams. Activity diagrams are really a form of flow chart as Venkat quite rightly points out. I’m a business analysis and I find that use cases and activity diagrams are really useful for me and then I’ll do a database schema and everything else as variations on a class diagram, but I use the UML a lot and I use less than half of it! Most people only use the diagrams they need, it’s a modeling standard, not a religion, and I can’t see anyone with a competitive standard. That means I think things will remain much the same until a lot more people in IT start using modeling and UML diagrams, and I don’t know what would cause that.

  7. kevola

    UML is a common language for expressing key system perspectives to others. I find that UML is more recognized amont developers and architects than any other notation, so that in itself makes UML a valuable addition to any architect’s toolbox.

  8. shyamgeek

    In my view the two primary reasons for the failed widespread acceptance of UML are as follows

    1. UML tried to follow the philosophy of one size fits all or the panacea for all problems of software design and evolved into a behemoth of umbrella specifications covering diverse diagrammatic notations. For a large complex system this proved to be too cluttered and cumbersome for practical use.

    2. UML does not add any value to the later stages of software development lifecycle such as code implementation or testing. It is only good for static or structural design. It does not in any way help in understanding the internal working of the system like the way CAD/CAM designs help in understanding the internal working of a mechanical systems.

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I’m Venkat

A passionate software engineer with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry. Welcome to my digital playground where I share my journey through the ever-evolving world of software development and cloud technologies!

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