ADPD and UML Adoption

In this book, the world of management and Agile development always suggested that we adopt the simplest technology and methodologies that can fit the project you are dealing with. These are the questions that can arise: How can UML fit these requirements? Can UML be employed with Agile methodologies and particularly with ADPD? How many types of diagrams should be used profitably with ADPD? This chapter will try to answer these and other questions that are asked considering UML as a tool for aiding development and management of Agile projects. Agile developers usually draw UML diagrams on a board in order to have a topic to discuss about formalized well-know common language. On the other hand, when these diagrams are transferred to a tool capable of managing UML notation, you obtain the advantage of having a documentation automatically generated that can be updated to your needs. As introduced in Chapter XI, UML and the automated documentation that some tools can generate, starting from a set of UML diagrams, can substitute the ADPD project document. This approach to documentation compels the project manager to make some choices and decide if some parts of the project have to be documented or not. In any case, it is better that this choice be performed by the project manager, who can select the most important features to be documented among the whole project instead of compelling the reader of the documentation to cut according to his judgment.