Link. Why UML (for Delphi users)

"Delphi is actively used in company "Garant" together with UML. Sometimes someone consider RAD tools and UML-modeling as opposite technologies. Developers and architects in "Garant" do use a combination of UML-modeling, automatic code generation andDelphi - leading RAD tool. Let’s ask them how do they do this and why do they use UML.

Vsevolod Leonov (Seva)- product manager, Embarcadero Technologies.

Alexander Lulin (Alex) - developer lead, Garant.

Maxim Krylov (Max) - project manager, Garant

Company "Garant" is well known in Russia due to its key product - "Garant" system to provide information on Russian laws. Most of the company’s employees are developers. Their key product was started 23 years ago. The system has tens of millions of code lines, written in different programming languages. Today we’ll ask the leads how they have managed to support high quality of the product for this scale, language heterogeneity, production tempo, and requirements on stability. One of the key technologies aside from Delphi (as well as C++)  is UML.

Seva: did you start using UML from the beginning?

Max: No, we didn’t. When we started the system "Garamt", UML was not invented then. In about 1997 one of our young developer (we all were pretty young that time) brought a diskette with one of the first UML modeling tool. We think that was a beginning of UML in our company. But it took years to start an effective use of UML as a full integrated part of the process.

Alex: Moreover, bringing UML into development was long and in some steps. But as the complexity of our software grew, we needed more and more some tool to manage the code and architecture of the system."

More - http://blogs.embarcadero.com/vsevolodleonov/2013/08/12/why-uml-for-delphi-users/