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> Besides, the state in which we are in is rather healthy. Back in the late nineties, early 2000, everybody was into class-based designs described with UML.

UML is great as collaboration mechanism at the enterprise level across sites.

> Also, the Gang of Four is seriously outdated.

Still largely unknown on the enterprise, sadly.

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Ah, the mythical enterprise. I've yet to see an example in which UML Class Diagrams have been useful, but whatever, I guess that's the same enterprise in which you've got "architects" outlining stuff in UML, then passing that to the monkeys to fill in the blanks.

I see them in all multisite projects using offshoring.

I find UML Class diagrams useful for a one-look document describing the overall architecture of a piece of software. Where they are weak is that you really do need a couple of paragraphs of plain English describing each class as well, and there's not really anywhere to put that on a UML Class diagram. The other really useful diagram in UML is the sequence diagram. If you write out the Sequence diagrams for a few key processes in your software, you've gone along way towards giving a roadmap to people that need to get in and modify the code. These are both documentation use-cases though. Using UML as a design tool (other than very informally on a whiteboard) seems wrong to me.

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