UML Designer is a tool for capturing and organizing requirements and other high-level design information as models, which can then be transformed into implementation using VisualAge for Smalltalk. You can also use UML Designer to analyze and document existing Smalltalk applications.
A model is a means of analyzing, representing, and documenting a system. The implementation of an object-oriented system can itself be regarded as an executable model. But modeling can also help explain a design in terms of higher-level abstractions (such as requirements and analysis objects) than the implementation code itself.
UML Designer is tightly integrated with the VisualAge for Smalltalk programming environment, with all models stored in the VisualAge for Smalltalk repository. This integration provides several significant benefits:
UML Designer provides design artifacts and tools that are flexible and can be used in many different ways. It prescribes no specific OO methodology; it is intended to support those elements of OO analysis and design that are common to the major methodologies and have generally proved most useful to working programmers. UML Designer supports an evolutionary approach to software development, where the design undergoes continual revision even after implementation has begun.