IMO UML is useless because whatever diagram gets produced means different things to different people and it's very complex but not check-able so people can make UML diagrams that are self contradictory or nonsense.
I find myself using a "method" of some kind when faced with a problem that's hard to think about. A communications protocol - nice to have a state machine to describe it for example. TLA obviously fits that niche even better. I've been lucky enough not to have too many problems recently that felt like they justified that effort but it's of incredible value when one does. Domain Specific Languages - so much better to use a parser framework than hand-code if you want to avoid all sorts of undesirable outcomes.
Currently most of my rework comes from changes to the requirements and our "customers" not really knowing what they want till we give them something and they say "not that."
This is partly because the people asking for things don't fully think out all the implications of what they're asking. It's mostly about not having enough knowledge in one place to make good decisions on.
I find myself using a "method" of some kind when faced with a problem that's hard to think about. A communications protocol - nice to have a state machine to describe it for example. TLA obviously fits that niche even better. I've been lucky enough not to have too many problems recently that felt like they justified that effort but it's of incredible value when one does. Domain Specific Languages - so much better to use a parser framework than hand-code if you want to avoid all sorts of undesirable outcomes.
Currently most of my rework comes from changes to the requirements and our "customers" not really knowing what they want till we give them something and they say "not that."
This is partly because the people asking for things don't fully think out all the implications of what they're asking. It's mostly about not having enough knowledge in one place to make good decisions on.