Other diagrams?
There are UML diagrams that are really only useful during planning, and become obsolete after that. I have found robustness diagrams to be like this, although we can argue whether or not they even count as UML.
Other diagrams, sequences in particular, I find to be essential tools that I simply can't live without. I was using Borland Together with great success despite its numerous bugs, and non-existant support. What I found was that I could begin drawing a sequence, and it would make it obvious to me when something had been left out. I could be sequencing a simple lookup, and as I draw the line where the presentation tier SHOULD be making a specific call to the business tier, find that the method I was intending to call wasn't there yet. I could add the new method right from the sequence and it magically appeared in the static diagram. In fact it was this freedom of discovery that allowed us to "riff" our way through a design with greater flexibility than trying to think of everything we would need in the static diagrams first, and THEN create sequences for them.
Before Together, we were doing this same sort of thing with Visio, but had to deal with the limitation that it was a one-way street. It sounds like this is still the case. The Class designer will be nicely integrated with the code, and changing something in one place will reflect in another, but there is no such integration for a sequence diagram. Is this, or could this be planned for the future?
I'd love to see a time when I'm thinking of eliminating a particular method, I right-click on it and pick "Show references", and see not only the CODE that calls it, but the sequence diagrams on which it appears which might be a lot easier to understand. I don't expect a sequence diagram to re-arrange my code for me, but integration with the mere existance of methods would be a great help.
