One doesn’t need to be wedded to diagrams one works out up front. Doing a bit of design upfront can be useful in fleshing out ideas. Whether that’s in UML, sequence diagrams, stories, or just some sketches on a whiteboard, or some notes on paper, what one does with them is up to the team. It need not determine everything that follows. You point out all of this yourself upthread.
Yes exactly. Pointing a development effort towards a goal or in some direction is a very different thing from an Enterprise Architect dropping a bible of UML on a team.
It sounds like the problem is the rigid adherence to the original design, not UML itself.
Good, okay. I was worried that, because I liked drawing UML diagrams, I was somehow a bad engineer! Just keep being flexible, and I'll be in good shape.
Just last week I deleted a whole bunch of boxes on a UML diagram I had drawn because someone suggested a simpler approach.
