I am relieved to hear you say that program managers use UML judiciously. In my experience, interpreting UML is rather like interpreting hieroglyphics. Look at the diagram, look at your pocket UML reference, look back at the diagram . . . Creating some of the diagrams isn’t that bad since they can be auto-generated from code and then tweaked for aesthetic reasons. Perhaps it is just the software that I have used. (Early versions of Rational Rose.)

Honestly, though, I think the standard was a little too ambitious and sacrificed clarity and simplicity for power and flexibility.

I use swim lanes a lot but usually by way of introduction rather than formal specification. Although I recently used them to debug a purported attack against a system I deployed and to show that the attack wasn’t real.

I have used UML as a more formal modeling language in the past, especially when I was working on BPEL but even then I used it more to help me debug the system then to formally specify the system’s functionality.

I’ve never used UML to actually write code but most of the code I write are prototypes or little tools for me since I’m a program manager not a real dev.

So while I do like UML and I do use UML (Gentleware’s editor is my favorite, I found Visio’s UML implementation to be a bit uneven) I tend to use it more for illustration and exploration than formal specification.

Sounds like you have had a good deal of interesting experiences in the 12 years since we last saw one another. Just out of curiousity, what do you think of UML? Where do UML diagrams go in the various documents you have discussed? (Use case scenarios etc…)

Did I see you mention a daughter in an earlier post? Congratulations.