Technology Snake Oil, Part 1: UML

I was told by someone recently at ThoughtWorks that I was so old that I "added to the company's diversity". Well, I've decided to take this sage old-timers wisdom and put it to some good use. In the development world, we keep getting sold Snake Oil in one guise or another, and I'm going to start pointing out some snake oil. Starting with the most venerated of crappy technology: UML.

Some of us craggy old-timers remember the time before UML, when we had Booch, Rumbaugh, and several other competing diagramming notations. The Holy Grail was going to be the Unified Modeling Language, which would solve all our problems and finally give us software developers a universal language, for everything from use cases through structure to deployment. And that's what we got. A classic example of "be careful what you ask for". UML feels like a compromise between a group of people, and it's so general that it's almost useless. The standards bodies keep bolting on new stuff to try to get it to the point of basic usefulness, but it just makes it worse. Does anyone really use Object Constraint Language to decorate their diagrams so that they can generate code that Just Works? I have never seen a case where you couldn't get it done faster by writing the code, then reverse engineering it into one of the expensive tools. Of course, it's good to design things before you code them, but a white board is much better. Combine the nature of UML with the fact that you can't ever show its diagrams to business analysts or end users because it is too obtuse, and I end up doing most of my architecture and design work in Visio (and I'm no fan of it either). It creates diagrams you can show everyone that capture the essence of what you are doing just before you implement it.

I'm not just a tourist in the UML and RUP world -- the company I worked for in the dim and distant past used RUP, and we foisted Heavy Duty Object-oriented Analysis and Design on clients, and used it ourselves. Why do you think I'm so militantly agile now? It just flat doesn't work for 90% of the types of projects that real developers write. And it's Bastard Child Model Driven Architecture is featured in an upcoming Snake Oil entry...