Practice · 1997–2012 · Object Wave
UML Everywhere
Diagrams as deliverables. Useful as a sketch tool; catastrophic when treated as source of truth.
UML became a billing unit for consultants who never opened the repo. Diagrams rotted the moment code shipped while developers lived in IDEs. It failed as a religion but survives as whiteboard shorthand — which was always the point.
Patterns
Context
Everything became an object — until it didn't
Objects promised reuse; enterprises bought the promise in bulk. Java gave a portable runtime with real teeth. CORBA and UML-heavy processes gave vendors a decade of workshops. The survivors were the languages and platforms that outlived the methodology theater. The lesson — complexity sold as architecture burns cash — returns every decade with new branding.
Compare with
Related
Practice · 1990–now
Big Design Up Front
Spec first, code later. Agile didn't kill planning — it killed pretending the Gantt chart was reality.
Architecture · 1991–2008
CORBA
Language-agnostic distributed objects. Complexity scaled faster than value for most shops.
$ Enterprises spent years on IDL, ORBs, and vendor lock-in for distributed objects that SOAP and REST later made look quaint — after the invoices cleared.