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Comment by rytis | Hacker News Reader

There's quite a lot of hate in the comments for UML is seems. And while a lot of it is quite valid, I have to say that sometimes I miss _some_ of what UML could do, especially in form of documentation. Sometimes a simple sequence diagram is able to communicate the behavior of a system much clearer than 10's of pages of disjointed prose... Just my opinion.

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Sequence diagrams are the one UML diagram I regularly still produce to communicate behavior both to other developers and less technically minded people. I personally find them great (as long as you don’t get carried away in very minute notation)

Nothing is stopping you from creating diagrams, but UML is not required to create useful diagrams. Most concepts can be diagrammed using only boxes and lines.

This could only be said by someone who hasn't sat through their Nth architectural overview where half the time is spent defining just exactly what was and was not intended by a particular line+arrow between two boxes when a simple sequence diagram would have been crystal clear.

Both simple box+line diagrams and sequence diagrams are entirely dependent on the creator's skill at creating diagrams. I've seen plenty of confusing sequence diagrams. I guess it also depends on whether your team find it useful that diagrams depict low-level highly detailed interactions as opposed to higher level architectural concepts.

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