> Ernesto Garbarino says that UML was killed by decreasing standards among programmers: “Agile was the assassin and user stories were her deadly, poisonous arrow heads (pun intended).”

I got my start in a shop whose CTO was a big believer in UML. I can tell you unequivocally that software processes from that era, while providing some useful lessons, were a result of the 90s software engineering Zeitgeist, which included these major aspects:

1) Non-technical management was still regularly involved in the management of software engineering and engineers needed to explain “Here’s how we will do X” to laypersons

2) Object Oriented programming was at the peak of its hype cycle, but most of the software development workforce had a superficial understanding of it at best. UML allowed you to explore a problem in an object oriented manner before writing any code and gave more OO-savvy engineers the ability to communicate these concepts to other developers who had no hands-on experience writing object oriented code.

3) The “style” of object oriented programming advocated back then would probably get your hand slapped during any modern code review… even by relatively junior developers.

4) Lots of software development practices we take for granted today were not universal: source control, fast build turn-arounds, automated testing. Likewise, because software was delivered via physical media and your ability to distribute patches was far more challenging the whole process was fundamentally more conservative.

So to bring this full circle, what changed since UML’s heyday?

1) Software engineering as an institution matured to the point where almost the entire management chain will typically know not just how to code but actually ship software (seed stage startups are an exception here)

2) Object Oriented programming hype has died down. It turns out it wasn’t the productivity boon we imagined (garbage collection and open source libraries did more for us)

3) Stronger and more robust type systems, Functional programming concepts, and unit testing methodologies are used to mitigate defects

4) Turn-around time to distribute a fix for a production defect is measured in minutes or hours - not weeks or months.

5) Things like CI/CD exist which would’ve made a 90s developers head spin.