Are UML drawing tools still relevant in 2012?
Only a few high-level UML diagrams survive the life cycle of the application
We need models to represent the software design. But even in large projects of about 500 man-months, I observed that only 3-4 sequence diagrams really matter and have a chance of surviving the entire life cycle of the application. Those 3-4 sequence diagrams (and class diagrams that represent their static time relationships), usually represent the high level design of the application.
Or, look at it this way:
Any decent enterprise application will not have 20 generic call flows. There will be one or two generic (or abstract) call flows, which all the concrete use cases implement. Let us take a simple Struts / EJB application. The generic flow will be something like - an action class calling a validator and then calling a stateless session bean, which in turn calls a domain class, which will call a DAO. All the use cases of the application just implement this flow with concrete classes that are specific to that use case.