Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development
I&#x27;ve use sequence diagrams a few times. I find any kind of diagram tooling to be a tedious time sink. The resulting output is a talking point at best. Some window dressing for a presentation or internal document. Fluff you add to impress some easily impressed managers or clients. I always feel slightly dirty doing stuff like this. I have UML distilled on my shelf. A signed copy even. Haven&#x27;t opened it in over two decades. It&#x27;s obsolete.<p>Diagrams are communication and marketing assets at best. They are not creative tools. You create them for other people; not for yourself. And it takes a lot of effort to create them. If you measure the value of your time in dollars per hour (as your clients&#x2F;employer should be doing), a good diagram can be several hours of work. So, it&#x27;s expensive. A few hundred dollars is nothing.<p>Next time you see a diagram, ask yourself the question &quot;would I pay 300$ for this thing?&quot;. In my case, the answer predictably is &quot;hell no&quot; 100% of the time. Asking the question is kind of answering it. Diagrams are rarely helpful. Either they are way to simple to add much value or way to detailed and hard to understand. There seems no middle ground here. So, you have three or four things with some arrows and labels. Well, yay! Tell me something I didn&#x27;t know already.<p>Diagrams are low value window dressing. A literal waste of time and money. I do them rarely, reluctantly, and only when people really insist on them (and I&#x27;ll push back a little). I find tools in this space tedious and frustratingly slow to use. I have more interesting things to do typically. If I do them at all, they are going to be a quick and dirty job.<p>It&#x27;s not just me. Objectively, diagrams are very uncommon in software development these days. They are not part of regular software development processes, clients don&#x27;t ask for them anymore, the vast majority of projects (and close to 100% of OSS projects) don&#x27;t have them, etc.