How useful is UML if I work alone in a project

In most cases we work together in projects but most of us have some proje开发者_StackOverflow社区cts which working on it alone.

In such projects, is it a good idea to use UML or not? and Why?

Thank you in advance

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Even if you are working alone, UML will help you to document your project.

If you also subscribe to Model-driven development and code generation, then the tool support may make your life easier if you subsequently revise your model (incl. keeping the documentation above up-to-date).

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It depends at which stage of the development you are and if you already know UML. If you are already codding then just create class and sequence diagrams of what you think is important to understand the code and what is in common with the other projects.

What language do you use to code ?

If java then I would recommend EclipseUML Omondo because you can create a model from more than one project. For example I had 12 projects which at tne end were united to create a very large project. It was really difficult to document everything. I did reversed every project then create a model project by merging all my 12 project. Finally I created class diagrams views to explain the static structure of my project and sequence diagram for understand what methods were doing. What is great with this tool is that you can mix .java and .class classes and that reverse engineering of sequence diagram can trace the reverse between classes from different projects. I also added graphical comments to explain what I was considering important, created about 100 views from the big model and my project was really very well documented.

Job done Happy man :-)

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If you look at your own code some months later, you will feel like another person wrote it. So documentation usually is a good thing even on solo projects. You can use simpler UML diagrams, but I do believe that they can be useful. Actually, on my current job, we work in a similar way and the UML diagrams had helped me on my own projects.