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What is the modern way to design (and maintain) things?

Improvised diagrams, design docs and ui mockups.

The problem with UML was it was far too specific. The aim was to just about generate the whole program code using charts which isn't what anyone needed.

> Improvised diagrams, design docs and ui mockups.

Are those supposed to be thrown out after first or second release?

> The aim was to just about generate the whole program code using charts

That wasn't the aim of UML.

Any model (including UML) serves two main purposes: to create system design and to document that design.

Class diagrams, the most used of UML diagram types, are not exactly for system design, they're too low-level, and yes, "Round-trip engineering" that generates code from class diagrams (and class diagrams from code) was advertised as important feature of advanced UML tools.

Converting classes into UML diagrams can be usefull regardless if you classify UML as obsolete or not. It's a nice why to understand how a given class or interface is used throughout.

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