The first thing you need to know is what the initials UML stand for. Don’t laugh—lots of people get it wrong, and nothing brands you as a neophyte faster. It’s not the Universal Modeling Language, as it doesn’t intend to model everything (for example, it’s not very good for modeling the stock market; otherwise we’d be rich by now). It’s also not the Unified Marxist-Leninists, a Nepalese Political party (though we hope you’ll never get that confused). It is the University of Massachusetts Lowell—but not in this context. UML really stands for the Unified Modeling Language.
Well, maybe that’s not the most important thing to know. Probably just as important is that UML is a standardized modeling language consisting of an integrated set of diagrams, developed to help system and software developers accomplish the following tasks:
Specification
Visualization
Architecture design
Construction
Simulation and Testing
Documentation
UML was originally developed with the idea of promoting communication and productivity among the developers of object-oriented systems, but the readily apparent power of UML has caused it to make inroads into every type of system and software development.