Been through all the silver bullets of the last 30 years, and the UML round-trip craze of the late 90s/early 00s were the worst.
Sequence diagrams, ERDs, state diagrams are all good things.
UML class diagrams were the worst though, mainly because the C++/Java world of inheritance of OO missed the entire point of OO, which was about the messages.
So people would create incredibly complicated diagrams to describe stupidly complicated class hierarchies. One company actually modelled "Money" as a subclass of "Currency" because it was going to have to handle the transition to Euros, but completely ignored the laws and regulations that the EU defined for how that conversion would happen, because it didn't fit their class hierarchy.
Yes diagrams are useful for documenting structure and behavior, but they're not good at being precise enough to describe those things to the point of generating code.
Also, all the CASE tool vendors of the 90s were trying desperately to maintain their relevance, so were bolting UML on the side of their tools, while bolting things like Zachman frameworks on top of them to appeal to the corporateobject hierarchy.
Sequence diagrams, ERDs, state diagrams are all good things.
UML class diagrams were the worst though, mainly because the C++/Java world of inheritance of OO missed the entire point of OO, which was about the messages.
So people would create incredibly complicated diagrams to describe stupidly complicated class hierarchies. One company actually modelled "Money" as a subclass of "Currency" because it was going to have to handle the transition to Euros, but completely ignored the laws and regulations that the EU defined for how that conversion would happen, because it didn't fit their class hierarchy.
Yes diagrams are useful for documenting structure and behavior, but they're not good at being precise enough to describe those things to the point of generating code.
Also, all the CASE tool vendors of the 90s were trying desperately to maintain their relevance, so were bolting UML on the side of their tools, while bolting things like Zachman frameworks on top of them to appeal to the corporate object hierarchy.