# Importance of UML's?



## AphexDreamer (Oct 23, 2013)

How important are unified modeling language diagrams in the industry and is learning to hand draw them essential when their are programs that can make them for you?

Also is learning to do them in Office Word a handy skill?

Because I get the feeling my Professor is wasting students time and education on teaching UML's over and over instead of teaching us how to actually code. We;ve moved to C++ and all she is talking about is UML's again. Not to mention on tests, she has us doing textual analysis and more diagrams.


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## W1zzard (Oct 23, 2013)

You need to know what UML is and how it works, best learn this at university, because nobody will teach you in real life.

In the industry you will rarely use them, unless you work at a company that enforces software engineering. UML is kind of a universal way to talk to the rest of your team without a lot of words, so you MUST be able to read them at least.

(simple) UML use case diagrams are very useful to illustrate things to your customers. Much better than the wall of text in a specification document.

Looking back at my university education (software engineering), they expected you to learn programming (grunt work) on your own, and used the precious time to actually teach you software engineering stuff, algorithms and other techniques that are difficult to learn on your own. Also we had some basic economics stuff which is always useful to know in the industry.

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If you don't know how to code, and have spare time, teach yourself, learn how to teach stuff yourself, it's an invaluable skill. Think up some simple project that you can barely manage with your current programming skills, then start implementing it (just chaotically, not software engineering). Nowadays there are tons of resources online, I'm thinking: API documentation, existing code samples, open source. Look up stuff as you move forward in your little project, understand, adapt, use tutorials only to get the most basic overview.


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