Unified Modeling Language seems like a good idea for software development ... Thinking about what you want to build before you do it makes sense. I wouldn't build a house without a well thought out plan ... but I would remodel one with just a shopping list (I am doing it now) ...

I have just bought a few books on UML and am trying to see if it will help my professional life ... we have very complex systems ... I am not the coder only the manager ... so I need to worry about the deployment and documentation end of things ... UML 2.0 has new stuff that seems to cover this area.

Here is a Learn UML in 7 days tutorial

This is a good page on RAD development I am not a very formal design person by nature - I think an iterative approach works best if possible.

UML is "owned" by the Object Management Group that controls the "standard" - the docs are freely available on their website.

Allen Holub has an UM LQuick Reference with lots of example diagrams (page down to see them)

Jason the CompSci Grad has a good posting about why he is relearning UML (he is also a drupal nut) -- does he really breakdance like his bio says?

So what’s with the obsession shift? Well, I don’t know if I would call it a shift. Drupal is still a huge passion of mine, but there’s only so much I can do with it. If I start working at a serious software development house, I need to know how to model software using UML, especially if I want to stay out of the development dungeons. I realized that to be a Business Systems Analyst, or a Software Engineer, or even a Software Architect, one has to be able to model the system requirement (Analyst), abstract the major objects in the system (Architect), and fill in the blanks to make it all work(Engineer).

If drupal UML has a home it may be theRiff Blog which has a good UML of the e-commerce modules.

Not much on the drupal site here is a short post in the documentation forum

The Eclipse UML 2 Project home page doesn't have any really easy to use stuff that I understand... I installed the plugin and it seems to work ... guess I need to learn some UML